g4

In 2000 St George’s Faculty of Medicine expanded its existing undergraduate medical education provision by providing a novel fast-track problem-based (PBL) MBBS curriculum for medicine taught over four years. Uniquely, this programme was open to graduates from any discipline including arts, humanities and law.

In 2007 SGUL merged its undergraduate medical courses into a single course, with separate entry pathways for graduates, school-leavers, and non-traditional learners from under-represented sectors.

The key phase where all these learners come together is a transitional year, known as the T year, which alternates PBL blocks with clinical attachments. Thereafter all students are integrated for their senior and final clinical attachments.

SGUL has continued to look for ways of improving links between the process of student learning and the needs of the practitioner. This effort to mirror medical and healthcare practice is best illustrated by reviewing stages in the evolution of our teaching methods. Our teaching and learning activities have increasingly adopted the approaches of practitioners in medicine and healthcare in a way that builds on generations of pedagogical paradigms, described as G1 to G4.

G1 – ‘traditional’ teaching in medicine, which would normally begin with modules in single discipline bioscience which in themselves had little relationship to ultimate learner needs (1980s).

G2 – the teaching moved to a body systems approach, e.g. respiratory system, which had greater relevance to clinical specialties e.g. chest physicians (1990s).This was a useful advance, but students still did not practise the competencies of practitioners, in solving even moderately complex problems.

G3 – began with the process of learning through scenarios based on practice which tied in sound knowledge and skills to the needs of the eventual practitioner. A common variant of this style in medicine is Problem-Based Learning (PBL) which ties in learning, developing decision-making, and problem solving skills. Students work through the patient case page by page with a facilitator, discussing the case, exploring possible diagnoses, investigations and treatments identifying learning objectives, and possible solutions as they go.