An Integrated Preclerkship Curriculum in Neuroscience, Psychiatry, and Neurology

Abstract

The study’s objective was to promote understanding of the integration of preclerkship learning in neuroscience, psychiatry, and neurology and to share the authors’ experience with such a program. A dualism, which may have survived in the past for lack of robust evidence of mind-brain relationships, is now increasingly outmoded. Medical school education should reflect the increasing coherence to be found in these fields. The authors describe curricular and course innovations and revisions at Harvard Medical School that have been implemented in successive iterations over the past decade. These changes have depended upon multidisciplinary leadership, planning, and faculty participation, as well as faculty development and closer coordination between classroom- and hospital-based activity. A hybrid, problem-based block course in the second year integrates basic science with neurologic and psychiatric topics that are aligned with practice of relevant clinical skills. The authors have achieved a high level of integration and coordination of these subjects at preclerkship levels in the domains of both knowledge and skills. The students, as well as the faculty, strongly endorse an intellectually coherent and clinically relevant program of integrated preclerkship learning in neuroscience, psychiatry, and neurology.