A model for integrating women's health issues into a problem-based curriculum

The process of incorporating new material into an existing medical curriculum frequently produces lengthy debate, political maneuvering, and competition for curricular time. The faculty of the Women's Health Education Program at MCP-Hahnemann School of Medicine, developed a stepwise process, or framework, for including women's health teaching for students in the problem-based curriculum. This process can be applied to the integration of any body of information. The key elements of the process are to define the full scope of what needs to be taught, develop teaching objectives, identify opportunities to introduce the information into the curriculum, develop strategies that capitalize on existing curricula, enlist the collaboration of a broad range of key faculty, develop evaluation tools, and assess whether students have achieved the expected competencies.