An example for a practice-oriented curriculum in social medicine under the conditions of the new medical licensing regulations - Experiences with practice-oriented teaching and possibilities for including practical issues into the teaching syllabus of social medicine after the introduction of the new medical licensing regulations

Experience with teaching medical students the subject of Social Medicine shows that their interest can be greatly improved by including practical issues such as interviewing chronically ill patients at home, or visiting patient counselling services in the community. With the introduction of the new licensing regulations for physicians, there will be only one final examination and the medical faculties will now have to conduct the examinations themselves. In order to create legal confidence in the results, sufficient homogeneity of the teaching syllabus in Vocational and Social Medicine courses as well as in the new Health Economics courses must be assured for all students. The merger of the two medical faculties of the Free University and the Humboldt University in Berlin have increased student numbers to 400 per semester, so that 20 groups will have to be taught simultaneously. This situation makes excursions to patients or to community facilities nearly impossible. Potential alternatives to allow inclusion of practical issues in the course, even under the new circumstances, are the use of problem-based learning techniques (PBL) such as the creation of theoretical cases dealing with special problems of Social Medicine or the use of standardised patients.