Undergraduate medical education in Slovakia--present state and future needs

There is a lot of problems related to undergraduate medical education (UME) at Slovak medical schools, e.g. low level co-ordination and integration of curriculum, isolation of teaching subjects, amateurish teaching methods, low level of management, which result in low level of effectivity, late and insufficient reactions to the needs of medical practice. There is urgent need for complex reform of UME if we like to be able to complete with high quality medical schools in Europe. The reform should be focused to the content of curriculum--to integrate preventive and acute medicine into the UME, to improve training of medical students for service in primary health care, to start with renaissance of humanistic education of medical students, to improve research training and teaching of medical informatics. For improving organisation of UME it is necessary to prepare modern profile of graduates from medical school, and from the profile to derive co-ordinated and integrated system of UME. The teachers at medical school should be professionals not only in medical specialization, but in pedagogy, psychology and management, too. Passive forms of education (e.g. lectures) should be partly substituted by active methods, e.g. problem--based learning. More attention should be devoted to elaboration of criteria for evaluation quality of teaching process. The reform of UME have to be done if we like to have a chance to be as good as the best medical schools in Europe. I believe, we want it all! (Ref. 31.)