Course description

Course lay-out

In this course the decision making process of the physician will be analysed; areas of particular interest are, gynaecology & obstetrics, infectious diseases, chronic inflammation diseases and cancer. Point of interest is the role of information in the decision making process:

• Which information is received by the physician and other healthcare professionals?
• Which information is required from additional research?
• To what extent decides a physician on evident knowledge, literature, peer consultation, evidence-based medicine, protocols, data from clinical trials, etc. Which uncertainties and information problems play a role in decision making?
• How does the physician stay up-to-date with all developments in his/her area?

Lecturers of clinical departments will demonstrate this with the help of patients. The patient logistics will be discussed in depth along with disease processes, treatment, prevention, epidemiology and scientific research. Besides the lectures, a short internship will be followed by the students. Insights will be acquired of the daily business of a physician of an outpatient department; the information flows are of particular interest. Lectures about patient logistics will be given. The internship will be ended with a report and an oral presentation. The theoretical part will be examined in a test.

 

Educational goals

At the end of this course the student has acquired knowledge of and insight into:

• common causes of human disease patterns, fundamental processes of disease patterns, prevention methods and diagnostic methods; several disease patterns are studied in depth, prevention and diagnostics
• methods and way of thinking of physicians; influences of disease patterns on methods and way of thinking of medical reasoning
• application of methods and techniques of epidemiology in scientific research

 

Involved departments

• Cell Biology & Histology
• Internal Medicine, department Infectious Diseases
• Internal Medicine, department Oncology
• Paediatrics
• Clinical Immunology & Rheumatology
• Medical Micro-Biology
• Pathology
• Patient Logistics
• Gynaecology & Obstetrics

 

Evaluation

Evaluation of the course and assignments

This course was all about disease processes. The course setup has been changed since the last year, there was less time available for this course. As a consequence everything went very fast. The lectures were very interesting, partially because of my interest for medicine. Especially the lectures about infectious diseases were very interesting and ofcourse the lecture about AIDS. The purpose of the internship was to map the information flows of an outpatient department. Together with another student I performed some research and have done some interview to answer our questions. Our supervisor was very enthusiastic about what we tried to answer and to map. I learned a lot during my internship and it was very interesting. It was the first time for the coordinator to setup a course. He was sometimes confused and not everything went fine the first time. Additionally, the questions of the exam were vague and unclear. When I saw the correction models I thought I had completed another test. Fortunetely I passed the exam the first time.