gms | German Medical Science

Background: A modular integrated curriculum of medicine was introduced at the Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin in 2010. Changing medical curricula from traditional to integrated competence-based concepts is a dynamic interactive process. It is essential to standardize the planning process to keep the curriculum development transparent for a faculty.

Summary of work: Each module is planned in 8 meetings with defined agendas, combined with formal faculty development elements. The faculty-wide planning process is supervised by an interdisciplinary module board, which contributes to the design of the module’s structure, the facilitation of its contents, the process of negotiation between the members of the entire faculty, and the delegation of work content. To optimize and to assure the planning process, best practice recommendations were developed and implemented. First, these recommendations focus on defining the role, the rights and the demands of the module board member. Second, they focus on ensuring a successful content-related and interdisciplinary planning process.

Summary of results: Our best practice recommendations represent an essential standard for curricular planning process. Thus, it is possible to intervene, whenever content, structure or process-orientated challenges arise.

Conclusions: Development of new curricula requires transparent quality control measures, which allow optimization of the faculty-wide planning process within a narrow time frame.

Take Home message: Best practise recommendations serve as valuable instrument to establish transparent quality assurance standards in the development of new medical curricula.