The focus on fundamental clinical skills in undergraduate medical education has declined over the last several decades. Dramatic growth in the number of faculty involved in teaching and increasing clinical and research commitments have contributed to depersonalization and declining individual attention to students. In contrast to the close teaching and mentoring relationship between faculty and...

BACKGROUND In Germany, family physicians (FPs) are increasingly needed to participate in undergraduate medical education. Knowledge of FPs' motivation to teach medical students in their practices is lacking. PURPOSE To describe a novel questionnaire that assesses the motivation of FPs to teach undergraduates in their practices and to show the results of a subsequent survey using this instrume...

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BACKGROUND Student mentoring is an important aspect of undergraduate medical education. While medical schools often assign faculty advisors to medical students as mentors to support their educational experience, it is possible for the students to pursue mentors informally. The possible role of these informal mentors and their interactions with the students in a faculty mentorship program has no...

Case-based teaching (CBT) tutorials were introduced by the Physiology Department at Adelaide University to bridge the gap between theory and practice in the early years of undergraduate medical education. With the use of a clinical case-based environment, CBT aimed to achieve integration of structure-function relationships and an increase in students' capacity to apply a physiological understan...

Access to well trained and motivated health workers is the major rural health issue. Without local access, it is unlikely that people in rural and remote communities will be able to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. Studies in many countries have shown that the three factors most strongly associated with entering rural practice are: (i) a rural background; (ii) positive clinical and edu...

1. The place of the general practitioner in medical care. 2. The meaning of basic medical education. 3. The reasons why a contribution from general practice is needed in the basic education of all doctors. 4. The nature of the contribution, in outline and in detail. This is presented as a range of content from which any medical school can choose. 5. The way in which this contribution differs fr...

In the light of ongoing changes and challenges in the European health systems which also have significant implications for undergraduate medical education, the present paper describes the accreditation of medical education programmes in Switzerland focussing on undergraduate medical education. A summary of the methodology used is provided and first experiences as well as future perspectives are...

Background There is currently no gold standard for delivery of systems-based practice in medical education, and it is challenging to incorporate into medical education. Health systems competence requires physicians to understand patient care within the broader health care system and is vital to improving the quality of care clinicians provide. We describe a health systems curriculum that utiliz...

BACKGROUND Portfolios are increasingly used in undergraduate and postgraduate medical education. Four medical schools have collaborated with an established NHS electronic portfolio provider to develop and implement an authentic professional electronic portfolio for undergraduate students. We hypothesized that using an authentic portfolio would have significant advantages for students, particula...