PRE-CLINICAL SKILLS: A competency-based assessment integrated course implemented early in the curriculum to prepare second-year medical students prior to entering clinical settings.

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. This describes the experience of University School of Medicine (URV) with the early introduction of pre-clinical skills learning in the undergraduate medical curricula to monitor and assessing these competencies as a prerequisite for medical students accessing their training in clinical settings. A PRE-CLINICAL SKILLS course has been developed to guarantee medical student's performance in managing clinically relevant basic medical sciences to interpret clinical scenarios, to develop technical communication skills and to value professional behavior throughout the first two years of medical education. The set of pre-clinical competencies evaluated in this course as well as the corresponding assessment methods have been established according to an international reference standards review work in collaboration with the regional quality assurance agency. An integrated formative assessment is being used. Since the academic year 2009-2010 about 130 students from second-year of Medicine follows this integrated trunk-course while being enrolled in parallel in other core courses as Physiology, Anatomy, and Histology. The program doesn't include lectures but only learning activities to train and monitor the successful achievement of the pre-clinical skills by medical students. A good majority of the participants achieve readiness for start training in clinical settings. As a whole, this course is useful ensuring patient's safety by identifying weaknesses acquisition of pre-clinical skills and predicting medical students who will have difficulty during their clinical training. Reflecting on our experience, we believe that the named course "PRE-CLINICAL SKILLS" overcomes the disadvantages of the traditional teaching methods. Helping students to conceptualize rather than memorize and encouraging them to integrate clinically relevant basic medical sciences concepts and principles by training pre-clinical skills in this competence-based assessment course prior entering into clinical settings.