[A national curriculum in neurology for medical education]

The knowledge within medicine is growing rapidly. It has become more and more difficult to decide what knowledge that has to be taught to medical students during their University Medical Degree (MD) education and what has to be omitted from their study plans. As help for teachers and students, a core curriculum of the education defines what is of importance for all students. However, there is a risk of "curriculum overload" with too much information being put into a short time interval. To avoid this and to define what is really the "core" of a course, a national consensus decision may be useful. As an example of this approach, we here report a new joint Swedish core curriculum in neurology for medical students. Teachers responsible for neurological education at all six universities giving University MD education in Sweden have in January 2003 agreed upon the core curriculum that we present. It is our hope that this method can be useful also for other clinical specialities.