The Community Project: the teaching implications of applied epidemiology

The use of the epidemiological method in primary health care (PHC) has become an accepted part of the service. The team will utilize community-oriented data in order to assess the health needs of the population, perform continued surveillance of changes in the health of the people served and for service evaluation. This development in health services has to find its counterpart in the training programme for the future doctor. This paper describes a 6-year experience with a community project carried out in the framework of a clinical clerkship in Family and Community Medicine. The students were able to define the project, collect the data and analyse it, and frequently see the start of the implementation of the recommendations.