HMI World | Printer-Friendly

MAY / JUNE 2006

FEATURES


Faculty from Dresden with the HMI team

Dresden educators work to advance clinical training

In the last decade the Carl Carus Gustav Faculty of Medicine at the Technical University of Dresden (TUD) has been at the forefront of German medical education reform. The school’s long partnership with HMI has resulted in comprehensive curricular reforms, and provided numerous opportunities for faculty to learn and incorporate innovative teaching strategies. In March, a contingent of faculty and students from Dresden came to HMI to discuss two major challenges: how to better integrate clinical teaching with clinical care and how to develop advanced faculty development programs.

According to Peter Dieter, PhD, a research biologist who is dean of medical education and student affairs at TUD, although the institution has made tremendous strides in addressing parallel areas of concern, they must now interweave those threads. “The main goal of the course for me was to develop proposals for addressing the harmonization of education and patient care,” he said.

In recent years, the medical school has instituted widespread educational reforms, achieved high national rankings, claimed prizes for teaching excellence, and earned accreditation of medical education from the International Organization of Standards. At the same time, a confluence of developments outside the faculty’s control have come to weigh heavily on the institution’s future plans. Government funding for medical education has dropped nationwide through a plan of privatization, leading in some German states to the fusion of faculties and hospitals, and intensifying the competition to attract both patients and top students. Structural changes in the health care system have challenged leaders in academic medicine to continually evaluate the appropriateness of their education programs.

Among the top priorities for Dresden and other institutions in Germany is the need to increase the amount of bedside teaching. Government legislation has dictated the number of hours of clinical teaching students should accumulate prior to graduation, but the onus has been on the schools to get creative and find ways to meet the criteria. In addition, the Dresden team cited the need to develop an assessment curriculum, institute longitudinal programs, and provide high-level professional development programs to help faculty become better bedside teachers and evaluators.


Dr. Connie Haag of the Dresden faculty during a working session at HMI

The weeklong program held at HMI provided an opportunity for the Dresden faculty to hear about different approaches to addressing their issues. Faculty from Harvard Medical School joined HMI’s Tom Aretz, MD and Elizabeth Armstrong, PhD to help the Dresden team explore how different models could be applied to their curricular challenges.

The group also benefitted from the participation of six Dresden students who were in Boston to complete clerkships in Harvard-affiliated hospitals and to do a research thesis in a laboratory. Having advanced to their sixth and final year of medical school, the students were well positioned to evaluate the strengths and shortcomings of Dresden’s new and innovative DIPOL® (Dresden Integrative Problem/Praxis/Patient-Oriented Learning) curriculum. The students suggested looking for ways to better integrate students into hospital care teams during the fourth and fifth years, an approach that would present more opportunities for the students to learn new skills prior to their sixth (clinical) year, without overburdening hospital staff. The students also made the case for bringing more real patients into their curriculum, with a reduction in paper cases.

What’s next for the Dresden faculty? Dieter and the team plan to translate the lessons of the March program into a set of proposals that they will present to the dean of the faculty. They will then establish working groups to develop approaches to addressing each of the challenges they have identified. “We want to implement these solutions into the study year 2006-2007,” said Dieter.