The medical programme (MB,ChB) of the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences (FMHS) is currently being renewed with the aim of making the curriculum more pragmatic for students, and more responsive to the health needs of the population.
It is envisioned that the new curriculum will come into operation in 2020. Various changes will be made to the current programme to address issues such as factual overload, and to instil greater interprofessional collaboration between disciplines, said Prof Julia Blitz at a recent meeting where the renewal project was announced. She is the Vice Dean: Learning and Teaching at the FMHS, and is part of the curriculum renewal project management team driving the process at the FMHS.
“The project entails more than just making changes to the programme content – it also relooks the process of teaching and learning," said Blitz.
This project is part of an university-wide programme renewal process launched in May this year. At a workshop in August, the project management team and other role players developed a broad outline for the new MB,ChB curriculum.
“We likened the curriculum to a DNA double helix. The one arm represents the theoretical and clinical components of the curriculum, while the other arm represents the graduate attributes – it's a double helix because the two need to follow each other. The base pairs of the DNA strands represent a continued, longitudinal focus on the self, the patient, the community and the healthcare system," Blitz explained.
The modules proposed by the project management team are:
- Year 1, Semester 1 – Being and becoming
The transition from school to university and the notion of becoming a doctor. - Year 1, Semester 2 – Health and wellness
The fostering of health and prevention of ill-health – with a focus on understanding what health and maintenance of “normality" is. - Year 2, Semester 1 – Form follows function
The link between anatomy and physiology. - Year 2, Semester 2 – Dysfunction
How things “go wrong" – in terms of self, the patient, the community, and the health care system. - Year 3, Semester 1 – Medical detective
Signs and symptoms, including collecting histories, performing clinical examinations, and making a diagnosis. - Year 3, Semester 2 – Interventions
The interventions to be implemented after making a diagnosis, including pharmacotherapy, surgery, radiotherapy, counselling, acting as change agents, etc. - A longitudinal primary care exposure component will be integrated into the first 3 years of the curriculum.
- Years 4 and 5 – Core clinical rotations and selective rotations, elective(s), and a research module
- Year 6 – Decentralised rotation
“An important principle that we want to embed in the renewed curriculum is to move away from discipline-specific teaching towards a problem-based curriculum," said Dr Liezl Smit, a consultant clinician in the Department of Paediatrics and Child Health. She explained that in practice, patients present with a problem and it is then up to the doctor to identify the disease. “In medical school we currently teach them about diseases, but then expect them to come into clinical rotation and make sense of a problem with a patient in front of them."
According to Prof Ben van Heerden, MB,ChB Programme Coordinator and Director of the MB,ChB Unit, medical curricula have to undergo regular renewal to keep pace with trends in health professions education globally. This is the third major overhaul of the FMHS's MB,ChB curriculum since the programme was launched in 1956.
“Our curriculum design should be based primarily on the health needs of the population and the needs of the health system," Van Heerden said. According to him, major changes are occurring in the country's healthcare system that will require medical graduates to be competent in all the roles described by the CanMEDS graduate attributes: health professional, communicator, collaborator, leader and manager, health advocate and scholar.
