Experiencing and designing community-based medicine - development and evaluation of an elective based on explorative learning.

Objective: To develop and evaluate an elective for the 6th semester in the medical curriculum at Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin. In this elective, medical students could experience and test Community Oriented Primary Care, hence the integration of public health into primary care, by using explorative learning methods. Method: In three consecutive semester, all participants of the elective filled in a questionnaire before and after the elective. The self-developed questionnaire covered socio-demographic features, an evaluation of the elective as well as a self-assessment regarding learning objectives and attitudes. The results were analyzed descriptively; the learning success was measured by mixed model regression. Results: Thirty-one students (100% of the elective participants) took part in the evaluation, 30 of them (96.8%) at both survey dates. The students evaluated the elective and particularly the commitment of the teachers as very positive. The five-level Likert scale showed a significant growth of knowledge by an average of 1.3 points. The attitudes of the students hardly changed. Conclusion: Students can experience Public Health practically by means of Community Oriented Primary Care. In doing so, explorative learning is an appropriate method providing a significant increase in competences.