Basic Trauma Management (BTM) a mandatory course for 3rd year Medical Students: Curriculum Revision

Abstract

The basic trauma management course has been taught exclusively face-to-face (F2F) in groups of 6-8 students at the University of Bern.

Over the years, a limited time for skills training has been noted and students seem little motivated to read the pre-course assignments or participate actively in classroom, probably because the course is not subject to a pass mark. The course curriculum is also not aligned with the POFILES report. Finally, the University of Bern welcomes, as of 2018, 350 medical students annually. All this creates the need to restructure and innovate the BTM course.

Our plan is to develop a blended-learning course composed of two parts: an e-learning theoretical module that aims to build and assess the cognitive knowledge of acute trauma care and an on-site training aiming to strengthen the psychomotor skills of acute trauma care.

The aims of this project are:

1. Curriculum revision and alignment with the PROFILES1 report and stakeholder´s inputs
2. Design and development on the e-learning module in ILIAS UniBe
3. Creation of a framework for evaluation and quality assessment of the project

The project will be set to run during both semesters of the study year in 2019/20.

E-learning is adequate and innovative in this setting because it delivers a significant amount of content to a large number of learners. The prepared content can be reused by different classes and both students and tutors will always have access to the platform, so that they can re-visit the contents in later stages of their training. There will be a quiz at the end of the module, before they can attend the face-to-face component of the BTM. All these strategies serve to increase student motivation.