Curriculum Overview
The new Mayo Medical School (MMS) curriculum that debuted in July 2006 is a historic and deliberate move to fully prepare students for the challenges of 21st century medicine.
Snapshot
At a glance, the new MMS curriculum is committed to:
- Active and cooperative learning styles, supported by a pass/fail evaluation system that encourages collaboration by eliminating competition for grades.
- A focus on patient care and clinical experiences that broaden and deepen classroom learning.
- Core competencies united by 5 themes:
- basic science foundation
- leadership
- physician and society
- clinical experiences
- pharmaceuticals and therapeutics
- Course lectures thematically integrated with clinic rotations. Morning lecture topics are revisited in the afternoon in patient care clinics on the same topic.
- Humane, healthy, flexible schedules to allow for the "five Rs" of effective learning that lead to enduring understanding: Students need repeated exposure to ideas and to reflect on new information; to seek and receive remedial support when necessary; to rest their bodies and renew their energy, optimism and imaginations through downtime, that includes recreation, community service, social outings and sleep!
- Continuous improvement, assessment and evaluation of the effectiveness of our curriculum through multiple feedback systems, including issuing students Audience Response Cards (ARCs). ARCs are credit card-size electronic feedback devices that enable students to quickly communicate to professors how well students understand a given lesson. ARCs help assure that students build a solid conceptual foundation before moving on to the next lesson.
Why change?
We believe the coming challenges to global health are unlike any the world has ever seen. These challenges require visionary changes in medical education if physicians of the future are to be optimally effective in providing the highest quality of care to the most people possible.
Certainly MMS’s previous curriculum produced physicians renowned for their extraordinary competencies and profoundly compassionate care. But future physicians will need to know more; integrate more information; master more forms of technology; collaborate more; lead more; analyze not just data and patient conditions, but social trends and health care policies – even funding formulas.
In short, future physicians will have to work more effectively, cooperatively and authoritatively in more spheres of influence than ever before. They will manage more information and more patients - perhaps with fewer resources, less time, greater urgency and higher expectations.
At MMS, our physician-faculty members are uniquely skilled - due to Mayo’s historic interdisciplinary collaborative model - to help students succeed in managing complexity on this scale.
How we did it
MMS refocused subject matter, themes, and practical clinical experiences to explicitly serve clearly defined expectations of competencies. The result is a more powerful alignment of teaching inputs with learning outcomes and a deeper congruence with the Mayo Clinic mission.
Nearly 100 years ago, Dr. William Mayo summed up the Mayo ethos and mission this way: "The needs of the patient come first." This truth is still the organizing principle for everything we do - from the clinic to the research bench to the classroom.
But patients’ needs are changing. Patient populations are changing. And science and technology make advances every week. We’ve changed not just to keep up, but to excel at preparing 21st century physicians who will need to understand high-throughput genomic analyses; bioinformatics; robotic and minimally invasive surgical techniques; improved imaging; nanoscale systems - all the while placing the needs of the patient first.
Growing physician interest in healing wisdom from other cultures brings still more change to our medical curriculum and we welcome this growth. MMS is committed to educating physicians to be fluent in many health care traditions, and to be fully prepared for the possibility of a global medical practice.
Highlights
- Study one topic at a time, for three to six weeks. This is known as a subject "block." For example, Block 1 is Leadership; Block 2 is Normal Structure, taught through molecular biology, basic gene expression; basic cell structure; microscopic anatomy. Morning session of the block are thematically reinforced in the afternoon during clinical integration sessions with patients, small groups of students, or in facilitated sessions with faculty members. In the first year, students take a series of seven blocks. The blocks address three fundamental themes, one at a time, in this order: basic structure, basic functions, basic principles. In the second year, students take a series of eight blocks that address three more sequential themes: organ systems; pathophysiology; diagnostics and therapeutics.
- Select 20 weeks of "selectives". Each block is separated by a flexible one- to-two-week-long academic enrichment period known as a "selective." Twelve-weeks of selectives are vacation periods such as the winter holiday or summer break. Twenty weeks are broken into 10 or more short courses that allow for career exploration, or specialty enrichment experiences such as time in a research lab or in community service. Students and faculty may design selectives. A limited number of selectives are required.
- Listen to shorter lectures (20 to 30 minutes long, versus 50 to 60 minutes long) during the four hours of daily lecture. Tighter focus on essential concepts leads to deeper student engagement, robust attention spans and higher aptitudes for learning.
- Experience more time in the clinic with patients; less time in lectures and lab. So-called "seat time" spent in classroom lectures has been reduced from an average of 36 hours a week to an average of about 20 hours a week. This reduction increases time for group learning, collaborative projects, reflection, and clinical immersion. This is a significant break with the past. By reducing seat time, MMS is encouraging students to take the initiative in learning; to know and master individual learning styles; to be thoughtful and attentive to self-care, in addition to patient care. Our goal is to nurture extraordinarily successful lifelong learners who are happy, healthful, expert and adaptable physicians.
- Establishes meaningful clinical context by involving students in patient care from week 1. As important as gross anatomy and pathophysiology are to medicine, MMS leadership believes these subjects take on even deeper meaning after clinical context is established through six months of microanatomy coupled with significant student-patient interaction. In the new MMS curriculum, cadaver studies begin in January of the first year.
- Embraces clinical immersion by taking full advantage of the 500,000 patients a year who seek care at the Mayo Clinic. MMS has the highest ratio of patients to medical students anywhere in the world - 500,000 patients to 42 students - and clinical experiences are therefore abundant and easily available. If cardiac function is the morning classroom topic, Mayo Clinic’s cardiology clinic is the afternoon clinical integration venue.
We believe
At Mayo Clinic, we believe our students’ energy, empathy, idealism, compassion, creativity and intellectual achievements are one of our greatest assets. We are deeply committed to ensuring that they build a solid foundation on which to improve health care throughout their careers
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