Early Clinical Exposure in Classroom Setting

There is an artificial divide between the pre-clinical sciences and clinical medicine in a traditional medical programme which results in medical students not encountering patients until the third or fourth year of study. Such curricula have frequently been criticized for this late clinical exposure. This book has emphasized the positive impact of early clinical exposure using case scenarios in a class room setting on students'' performance. Case-based learning is a long established pedagogical method and has gained considerable attention recently as a leading approach to student-centered learning. This teaching method allows the learner to experience similar thought processes to those they will use in the clinical setting. Learner learns to generalize the information learned from one particular case to other patient''s problems.