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Teaching & Learning

Teaching and Learning Index

Undergraduate Teaching Overview

General Practice and Community Medical Education has provided teaching for medical undergraduate students in all five years of their course for many years.

In common with other UK medical schools the University of Aberdeen has responded to the GMC publication ‘Tomorrow’s Doctors’ by developing a new curriculum which is student centred, has a reduced factual content and a stronger emphasis on teaching within the Community.

The Community Course (Year 1), (Year 2) and (Year 3)

Teaching in Years 1, 2 and 3 is delivered as part of the Community Course. This course, entitled "Humans in Society", is run jointly by six units: Child Health, Academic Primary Care, Medicine for the Elderly, Mental Health, Occupational and Environmental Medicine, Public Health.

In Year 1, the course focuses on "Health and Normality", and in Years 2 and 3 it moves to "Illness, Disease and Disability". See below for further details

The Community Course recognises a pattern of medical care that renders medicine in the community of increasing importance to medical students. Changes contributing to this include:

Increasing relative importance of chronic diseases, that are mainly managed at home: as death from infectious disease has become less common, so the prevalence of degenerative disease has increased;
A shift in focus of care from hospital towards the community, for conditions such as diabetes and asthma;
Decreasing average length of stay in hospital, particularly with surgical conditions.

As a result of this pattern, confinement of students’ clinical study to the hospital will not expose more than the iceberg’s tip, which although sharp, often represents an unusual presentation in unusual circumstances. Illnesses prevalent within the community may not produce much “blood and guts”, but they will fill a large part of our graduates’ professional lives.

The main underlying principles of the design and delivery of the course are:

To allow early patient contact, promoting the relevance of medical study and a sense of professional identity;
To promote a patient-centred “holistic” approach to the provision of medical care;
To consider medicine and patients on three levels: individual, society, population;
To unify rather than perpetuate artificial divisions in the ethos of medical care, by adopting a multidisciplinary approach;
To allow comparison of community with hospital patients, and facilitate learning from the differences;
To work with an adult learning model, including individual research, group learning, reflection on experience, and theorising from practical examples;
To facilitate personal development of individuals (skills and attitudes).

The first part of the course is entitled Humans in Society and covers three years:

Year 1 – “Health and Normality”
Year 2 and 3 – “Illness, Disease and Disability”

As these suggest, it is the intention to begin by studying definitions and meanings of health, with factors that can influence this. In Years 2 and 3 the Community Course concentrates on the effects of disease on patients’ lives and those of their families and communities.

Later Years (Year 3 and Phase IV)

In Year 3, students undertake nine timetabled five-week modules. One of these blocks is spent working within a general practice based either in Grampian, Fife, or in the Highlands. General Prcatice and Community Medical Education is responsible for “The Community Block” which also has input from Public Health and Environmental and Occupational Medicine. The block includes an attachment to a practitioner and his/her practice for five weeks, the student interacting both with patients and with the primary health care team.

The formal group teaching is centred around two days both at the beginning and at the end of the block with these days being held in the Department. This teaching involves seminars, group discussions and a role-play session on “Handling Difficult Communication Situations” which is designed to equip students with advanced communication skills beyond the basic skills taught in earlier years. For one session, the Aberdeen group takes advantage of Videoconference technology, being taught by a general practitioner based in Stornoway in the Western Isles via the teleconferencing link.

Each block, one sub-group of students has the opportunity of working at the Inverness Campus.

In the final year, Phase IV, students have to complete an eight-week block in a community discipline. These are defined as General Practice/Primary Care or Mental Health.

The first week of the block delivers joint teaching in Mental Health and General Practice. The timetable includes 5 clinical scenarios of issues common to both Mental Health and General Practice (Adolescent Eating Disorder, Addictions, Dementia, Somatisation and Anxiety/Depression). These sessions involve role-play with trained actors/patients. The rest of the week has sessions on Occupational Stress, Aggression Management, and a careers session on General Practice and Mental Health.

Following the initial week the students then spend seven weeks in general practice. During their attachment the theme is that of the medical apprentice and professional development. The students in the same geographic area form a cell, which meets on five of the seven weeks to discuss practice topics and problems. These cells include Aberdeen City, Buchan, Kincardine and Deeside, Gordon, Moray, Dumfries and Galloway, Shetland, Western Isles, Inner Moray Firth, Skye and Lochaber, North Highland, Argyll and Orkney.

By the end of the attachment students have to have completed a structured reflective log diary, whihc inlcudes an audit on any aspect of general practice and primary care. This allows the students to pursue areas which may be of particular interest to them and study them in greater depth.

Teaching Infrastructure

Teaching and assessment is regularly monitored and reassessed on a monthly basis by the departmental teaching group. Planned revisions of current courses and development of new courses are ongoing, with the option to introduce changes at the start of each new session.

Other courses

In addition to the undergraduate medical curriculum several members of the Department provide teaching and advice to other courses (including the intercalated B.Med.Sci ) and educational institutes and hold honorary academic appointments with them.

Academic Primary Care
University of Aberdeen · Polwarth Building · Foresterhill · Aberdeen · AB25 2ZD
Tel : (01224) 437264 · Fax (01224) 437285 · Email: primarycare@abdn.ac.uk

Page last updated: Thursday, 16-Aug-2012 11:32:52 BST

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