Doctors for the new millennium

The new course is radically different from the traditional one it replaces. Students will study differently, acquire clinical skills differently and be assessed differently. They will also spend more time in the community.

The five-year course leads to the degree of Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (MBChB). It has been revised extensively following the University's acknowledgment that medical students were being asked to learn too many facts and were not seeing patients soon enough. It also follows a request by the General Medical Council for all medical schools to introduce new forms of learning and better methods of assessment, and to improve students' ability to talk to patients.

The University is one of the first medical schools in the UK to make radical changes to its undergraduate curriculum. It breaks new ground in the amount of time students will spend learning medicine and having contact with patients in the community.

Professor Sam Leinster, Director of Medical Studies, explained that students will spend more time in the community partly because of the importance of primary health care in the new health service, and partly because that is where the greatest numbers of patients are to be found. 'Whether people are well or ill, students need to learn what the community does to influence health and to respond to illness and disease,' he said.

Throughout the five years of the course, clinical and theoretical learning will be integrated with practical experience in the community. Overall, students may spend up to half of their clinical time working in general practices and health centres.

Students will acquire clinical skills much earlier than before. In the first week of study they will begin using an entirely new Clinical Skills Resource Centre, which is one of the largest and best equipped in the country. The new Centre will enable them to gain experience of examining models and simulators so they can proceed with confidence to the examination of patients, in the second year. Previously, students did not meet patients until the third year. Also in the first year there will be a programme of tutorials to develop the students' skills in talking to and listening to patients.

The new teaching methods have been tried and tested by medical schools in other parts of the world, and are being introduced in other medical schools in the UK, but the Liverpool curriculum is innovative in many other ways. Professor John Bligh, Professor of Medical Education, said: 'We are keeping the best of our old course, which is clinical bedside teaching, but we are changing almost everything else. The emphasis on learning in the community will give students a broader appreciation of health care than can be gained in hospitals alone. It will introduce them to such issues as teamwork, the effective management of resources, the management of chronic disease and the importance of the environment to health.'