Planning activities within an integrated curriculum: the risk of “disintegration”

Abstract

Introduction: in 2014, after 10 years of the establishment of the School of Medicine at the Instituto Universitario Hospital Italiano de Buenos Aires (IUHIBA), the educational community identified the need to make a curricular change to teach complex skills in an integrated way to generate meaningful learning and further development of skills. The new curriculum was implemented in 2018. Purposes: to describe our experience in designing teaching activities for an integrated curriculum. Development: multidisciplinary planning groups were formed to design the activities of each four-month module. The main objective was for students to develop the skills necessary to carry out professional activities (EPAs: Entrustable Professional Activities) by the time of graduation. The “Initial Cycle” activities took place in four scenarios: (i) problem-based learning; (ii) skills lab (iii) forum discussions; and (iv) communityoriented education. The EPAs that would be acquired in the Initial Cycle were selected. Those EPAs, together with the contents selected for the semester guided the planning groups. To ensure an integrated design, the relationships of each module with the preceding one were established. We adopted a spiral design where we returned to the same topics at a deeper level and with more complexity. Conclusions: the greatest challenge was that this experience involved a paradigm change. Our main achievement was to adopt a new form of teaching that was student and problem based, within an integrated and spiral curriculum. We plan to evaluate the results after implementation and redesign the activities, if necessary