[Medical education and the integration of teaching and health care activities]

A research project involving eighty first-year medical students who observed the experiences of first-time patients admitted to a university hospital in South-eastern Brazil was undertaken during the first semester of 1989. The students conducted 260 interviews and followed the patients through from the time of admittance, observing the patients' expectations, values and attitudes towards minor complaints. The objective of the experience was to open a forum for discussion about excessive specialization and inadequacies in the curriculum in preparing the future medical professional to meet the needs of the population. Both the criticisms in the students' testimonies and the data collected at the interviews, as well as the concrete facts and practical proposals regarding the modification of the curriculum, concur with the Edinburgh Declaration of 1988. They point to the need for the adoption of a mode by which teaching and assistance activities, might be integrated from the very beginning of the physician's training.