The teaching of basic clinical skills at School of Medicine, University of São Paulo.

This article describes how is the teaching of basic clinical skills given to the 3rd in the undergraduate program, at the School of Medicine, University of São Paulo. This course has been implementing some techniques of teaching-learning for last years in order to become it more dynamic and interesting. Small group teaching is the main feature of the course "Basic Clinical Skills" given at the University of São Paulo, School of Medicine. This technique is improved by keeping each group with a teacher for a long time to allow better integration between them and to facilitate a better acquisition of attitudes towards the patient and all the team involved in the care of patient. All the classes are practical with early contact with real cases. Medical students learn how to take down the medical history, how to perform an adequate physical examination and make diagnoses under supervision of their teachers. Discussion cases, recognition of medical patterns and hypothetic-deductive strategy are used to develop an efficient medical reasoning. The authors show the results obtained through questionnaires filled in by the students at the end of the course and the analysis of which demonstrates that the students are highly satisfied with these kind of strategies and profit better from them. In 1996 and 1997, respectively, the course's satisfaction was 93.13% and 88.08% (excellent + good). The students' capacity to perform their objectives is situated in their majority between 6 and 8, these values represent a good and sufficient to very good performance.