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9th Annual Meeting 
of the 
International Association of Medical Science Educators 

July 14-19, 2005
 

Abstract Category: Curriculum

Poster ID: C2

DEVELOPMENT OF AN INTEGRATED MS1 BASIC SCIENCE CURRICULUM AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA SCHOOL OF MEDICINE

Stephen G Chaney, PhD*, Marco A Aleman, MD, Cheryl F McCartney, MD, Cherri D Hobgood, MD, University of North Carolina School of Medicine , Chapel Hill NC 27599

Traditionally the courses in the first year curriculum of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine have been departmentally run and primarily lecture based with a small number of small group case conferences. While students performed well on the USMLE Step 1 exam, there were three major concerns with this curricular format. First, across multiple years student feedback included concerns that the first year curriculum was not clinically relevant, that it was overly detailed, and that there were too many high stakes exams. This caused frustration among the students.  Second, despite significant effort to integrate material between courses and to eliminate gaps and redundancies, course and departmental “boundaries” hampered these efforts. This frustrated the faculty. Finally, due to the advanced nature of the scientific inquiry focused on by our research programs most basic science departments were finding it increasingly difficult to find faculty to teach the basic science courses.   To address these concerns a faculty task force was created in Spring 2004 to recommend revisions for the first year curriculum. The task force made 7 recommendations: 1) create four blocks of closely related interdisciplinary, fully integrated courses in the first year, 2) create a year-long clinical applications course spanning blocks and providing clinical applications for the basic science material, emphasizing the major causes of mortality and morbidity in North Carolina, 3) appoint co-directors consisting of a clinical faculty member and a basic science faculty member for each block course, 4) limit in-class time to 25 hrs/wk, 5) develop a framework for individualized learning experiences, 6) shift the responsibility for appointing Co-Directors and teaching faculty to the Dean’s office with consultation by the departmental chairs and 7) develop a plan for evaluating and improving the curriculum on an annual basis.  Buy-in of faculty and department chairs was facilitated by the previous successful reorganization of the second year curriculum, the success of similar integrated curricula at other schools, and the strong support of a new administration.  The first year curriculum task force remains active in the design of the curriculum and has developed a phased 3-year implementation strategy to begin in the Fall of 2005.

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