The core psychiatry clerkship, typically held during the third year of medical school, serves as the primary opportunity for medical students to gain exposure to the clinical practice of psychiatry. Multiple studies have evaluated the effect that the clerkship has on students, and a clear body of evidence indicates that the clerkship influences students’ attitudes towards the field of psychiatr...

BACKGROUND Residency programs have utilized Individualized Learning Plans (ILPs) to customize resident education while undergraduate medical education has not done so in a meaningful way. We discuss the use of ILPs within a fourth year medical school course to facilitate self-directed learning (SDL). METHODS At Stony Brook University School of Medicine, an ILP component was added to the Advan...

OBJECTIVES In undergraduate medical education, the topics of errors in medicine and patient safety are under-represented. The aim of this study was to explore undergraduate medical students' behavioural intentions when confronted with an error. DESIGN A qualitative case vignette survey was conducted including one of six randomly distributed case scenarios in which a hypothetical but realistic...

BACKGROUND Despite extensive research data indicating that cooperative learning promotes higher achievement, the creation of positive relationships, and greater psychological health for students at all levels in their education, cooperative learning as a teaching strategy is still underutilized in undergraduate medical education. METHODS A cooperative learning task was introduced as part of t...

BACKGROUND Autopsies continue to have a multifactorial role in the delivery of modern undergraduate medical education, despite the radical educational reforms and decline in autopsy rates over the last decade. This study was conducted to highlight the usefulness or otherwise of autopsy as a part of MBBS curriculum from students' point of view, especially in the backdrop of the controversy among...

Medical ethics education, it has been said, has 'come of age' in recent years in terms of its formal inclusion in undergraduate medical curricula. This review article examines the background to its inclusion in undergraduate curricula and goes on to examine the consensus that has arisen on the design of ethics curricula, using Harden's curriculum and S.P.I.C.E.S models as templates. While there...

Purpose Mentoring is considered a valuable component of undergraduate medical education with a variety of programs at established medical schools. This study presents how new medical schools have set up mentoring programs as they have developed their curricula. Methods Administrators from 14 US medical schools established since 2006 were surveyed regarding the structure and implementation of th...

OBJECTIVE Online learning is an efficient new educational method that is able to link teachers with geographically dispersed students and capture the interest of students with interactive materials. Our objective was to describe curricula of new Web-based electives about pain for undergraduate medical education. DESIGN We created three interactive Web-based elective courses about pain targete...

CONTEXT The teaching and assessment of clinical communication have become central components of undergraduate medical education in the UK. This paper recommends the key content for an undergraduate communication curriculum. Designed by UK educationalists with UK schools in mind, the recommendations are equally applicable to communication curricula throughout the world. OBJECTIVES This paper i...

Nearly 90 million Americans live below 200% of the federal poverty threshold. The links between lower socioeconomic status and poor health are clear, and all physicians face the resulting challenges in patient care. Current medical school curricula do not adequately prepare students to address this issue despite recommendations from the Association of American Medical Colleges and the Institute...