Impact ePBLnet

Education for clinical practice is a complex process, involving the development of a body of knowledge, skills, and multiple aspects of professionalism. ‘Traditional’ approaches, with modules in single discipline biosciences, bore little relationship to eventual learner needs for clinical practice. The natural development of learning directly through patient scenarios is now a cornerstone of undergraduate and post-graduate education. Real or virtual patient encounters provide rich and memorable settings for learning as a healthcare professional.

Curriculum modernization is a clear objective part of the Bologna Process. EU partners have taken part in partnerships in curriculum transformation and resource reuse and retrieval and provide the ideal guidance for setting up national centers to promote curriculum development in post-Soviet countries.

This ePBLnet group will engage with other networks which have their own needs for scientific cultural preservation, development of educational resource in local languages, and adaptability to local needs. This partnership has been selected and put together with this objective in mind, so that development can be sustained long after the project funding has ceased, using approaches which are already tried and tested. In this way, the group can achieve critical mass in the number of academics and institutions involved with ePBLnet and use this as a driver for internal support and continuation. It can also reach out to a wider range of local cultures, with a common framework of Soviet medical traditions.

 Since 2012 SumDU Medical Institute is involved in the implementation of the educational project "Establishment of the supra-regional network of the national centers in medical education, focused on PBL and virtual patients" of EU TEMPUS Programme. This was the first experience of such project realization in Medical Institute, so extraordinary attention was paid to it. Application of provisions of the Law of Ukraine from 01.07.2014 No. 1556-VII «On Higher Education" supposes the implementation of wider university autonomy, creating their own curriculum and programmes. In this context, the possibility of modernization of the medical curriculum by using the interactive forms and method of problem-based learning, provided in frames of the project is rather significant. The creation of the medical centers' network will allow implementing, monitoring, and managing the innovations in the field of medical education, improving control systems of training doctors towards the needs of clinical practice.