Introduction: Integration levels vary in the basic medical pre-clerkship years. We aimed to discover the deficiencies and increase the level of integration for the multidisciplinary curriculum of the 1st 2 academic years at The Faculty of Medicine, Helwan University. We used Project-based learning (PtBL) via designing Clinically-applied team-based integrated research project tasks. The purpose was to make students fully appreciate the relationship between basic disciplines and their relevance to practice hence boosts their learning.
Methods: We designed interdisciplinary integrated research project tasks (cases/symptoms/signs) that followed each module's objectives. Students worked in teams to write and deliver project reports. They analyzed the assigned tasks and used reasoning to create diagnoses, relate the condition to the disrupted normal structure/functions, suggest/contraindicate specific treatment plans, and create preventive plans based on their understanding of the basic medical sciences. A survey was introduced to assess students' perceptions of the learning approach used. Students' responses were analyzed.
Results: Deficient-, unrelated-, & should be related in an interdisciplinary way- topics in the curriculum were discovered and reported during the projects' design. Students (n=694) completed the survey (52% response rate). Most (84.6%) were satisfied by the integrated interdisciplinary project, and 57.9% preferred substituting the traditional lectures completely by integrated PtBL. Students significantly (P=0.000) understood the relation between objectives of disciplines after project completion (mean 3.66, SD ±0.92) than before it (mean 3.46, SD ±0.91). A significant relation was detected between the rank given to the perceived degree of the integration between basic to clinical sciences in the projects and both the rank perceived for students' developed clinical reasoning (P=0.000) and the students' choice of implementing future learning via the integrated project tasks (P=0.002).
Conclusions: The PtBL can be used as a complementary learning method to elevate the level of integration within a multidisciplinary approach to boost students' learning.
