The first batch of the Ottawa-Shanghai Joint School of Medicine (OSJSM) students already entered the medical curriculum of the University of Ottawa, having finished the introduction and foundation units, and is half way through unit 1. The OSJSM UGME office held a Student Feedback Meeting on April 17th 2017 to hear about what the students have to say about the curriculum so far. Dr. SHAO Li, OSJSM Executive Dean, Dr. LI Yi OSJSM Program Administrator, and Ms. ZHANG Fang Premed and Foundations Liaison Officer attended the meeting.

About CBL

The students brought up that the quality of CBL sessions between different groups varies. To solve this problem, the OSJSM will organize more CBL faculty development sessions and align the CBL teaching requirements. And Dr. SHAO shared methods of preparing for CBL sessions with the students, and reminded the students of the importance of preview.

About CPP

The Community Preceptor Program (CPP) starts from Unit 1. In CPP, the students will go to Community Health Centers to study under the guidance of community preceptors half a day per week. The students have opportunities to practice history taking and physical examinations. After half a semester, the students respond well to such teaching methods and gained a lot of insights from the interactions with patients. But they feel the patient source in communities is imbalanced between areas. OSJSM will collect all the feedback on CPP and choose suitable community preceptors accordingly, with the aim of providing more opportunities to communicate with the patients and enhancing the effectiveness of CPP.

The students gave some suggestions and comments on the sequence and linkage of courses, as well as teaching methods. The students are keen to know how to make smooth transition from medical foundations to clerkship. The Back to Basics course is to review and consolidate the foundations, and to pave the way for clinical rotations.

Diverse teaching methods is one of OSJSM UGME curriculum features. Besides lecturing, different methods such as CBL, UDA, LAB, SLM, PSD and SIM are employed to achieve the optimum effect. After one and a half semesters’ study, the students and teachers overcame the difficulties of adapting to a new curriculum. Meanwhile, One45 system is introduced from the University of Ottawa Faculty of Medicine to track the evaluations and feedback from both the teachers and the students. OSJSM will also hold student-teacher feedback meetings from time to time so as to better implement and promote the newly introduced North-American curriculum.