bedside basic science – supercaseS FACILITATES INTEGRATION OF BASIC AND clinical SCIENCES.

Hans Gyllenhammar, MD, Ph.D*, Karouk Said MD and Birgitta Björck, Coordinator. Karolinska Institutet, Institution for Medicine, Karolinska University Hospital Huddinge. S-14186 Stockholm, SWEDEN.

PURPOSE: To test the concept of continuous and transparent integration of basic- and clinical sciences in a new course within the Karolinska institute (KI) medical curriculum.

METHODS: In the new, integrated curriculum of the KI we designed a 5 week elective course “Inflammation in Clinical Medicine”. The course was designed to include two modules: One traditional with lectures and demonstrations. In this module basic and clinical science were presented mostly as separate entities. The second part was based on supercases (see e.g. B. Björck et al., IAMSE 2005) where basic and clinical sciences were completely integrated. The students were introduced to their supercases – patients currently in the hospital. They extract all that is of importance for inflammation from the case. They are instructed to find evidence for their conclusions in original publications, meta-analysis or review articles. All conclusions should be evidence-based.

RESULTS: On a scale from 1 to 10 (best) the students evaluation of the conventional module at 7.4 whereas the integrated module was evaluated at 8.1. The evaluation of the integrated module was reduced by a small number of students who were rather negative whereas 85% rated it at 9 or 10. However, teacher evaluation strongly favoured the integrated module stressing high student activity and excellent learning outcome.

CONCLUSION: More study is needed to find the best way to integrate basic and clinical science but we find the results for supercase-based integrated learning to be most promising and we are currently planning a new study.