The Berlin reformed curriculum in undergraduate medical education: a retrospective of the development history, principles, and termination

The Reformed Medical Curriculum (RMC) at Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin was launched in autumn 1999, while medical schools in Canada, the United States, Scotland, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia already had adapted educational reforms in medical education many years before [1], [2]. For eleven years, 63 medical students per year trained at the Faculty in accordance with international standards governing the RMC. It was the first and perhaps most revolutionary reformed medical curriculum at a German university after the commencement of “Modellklausel”, a new section in the Licensing Regulations for Doctors (Approbationsordnung für Ärztinnen und Ärzte) in 1999 that paved the way for fundamental reforms within undergraduate medical education in Germany. The idea was to establish and test a “pilot project of a fundamental reform of medical education in Germany” [3], thus aligning Germany with international developments and establishing a model for other reform initiatives. The first part of the article will provide an overview of how the RMC were able to emerge. It reports who initiated the project and why, who kept it running and encountered opposition and what were the social and political conditions. The second part of the article describes the principles that were fundamental for the development of the RMC. The third part illustrates the quality assurance measures, and the final section covers the termination of the RMC.