Implementation of a Clinical Reasoning Course in the Internal Medicine trimester of the final year of undergraduate medical training and its effect on students' case presentation and differential diagnostic skills

Background: Clinical reasoning, comprising the processes of clinical thinking, which form the basis of medical decisions, constitutes a central competence in the clinical routine on which diagnostic and therapeutic steps are based. In medical curricula in Germany, clinical reasoning is currently taught explicitly only to a small extend. Therefore, the aim of this project was to develop and implement a clinical reasoning course in the final year of undergraduate medical training. Project description: A clinical reasoning course with six learning units and 18 learning objectives was developed, which was taught by two to four instructors on the basis of 32 paper cases from the clinical practice of the instructors. In the years 2011 to 2013, the course of eight weeks with two hours per week was taught seven times. Before the first and after the last seminar, the participating students filled out a self-assessment questionnaire with a 6-point Likert scale regarding eight different clinical reasoning skills. At the same times, they received a patient case with the assignment to prepare a case presentation and differential diagnoses. Results: From 128 participating students altogether, 42 complete data sets were available. After the course, participants assessed themselves significantly better than before the course in all eight clinical reasoning skills, for example in “Summarizing and presentation of a paper case” or in the “Skill to enumerate differential diagnoses” (p<0.05). The greatest increase occurred in the skill to recognize typical cognitive errors in medicine and to identify risk situations for their occurrence (pre: 2.98±0.92 and retro-pre: 2.64±1.01, respectively, versus post: 4.38±0.88). Based on the ratio of number of words used per keywords used the problem presentation of the paper case was significantly more focused after the course (p=0.011). A significant increase in the number of gathered differential diagnoses was not detected after the course. Conclusion: The newly developed and established Clinical Reasoning Course leads to a gain in the desired skills from the students’ self-assessment perspective and to a more structured case presentation. To establish better options to exercise clinical reasoning, a longitudinal implementation in the medical curriculum seems to be desirable. Faculty training would be useful to implement the concept as standardized as possible.