Help us to help you: Adopt new curriculum, urges DUHS

Varsity offers to train other medical university faculties on improved method of teaching.

KARACHI: Dow University of Health Sciences (DUHS) has expressed its intention to aid other public sector medical universities to adopt a five-year integrated modular curriculum for their MBBS programmes.

This was announced during a meeting of the vice-chancellor with the media at Dow Medical College.

DUHS vice-chancellor Prof Masood Hameed Khan said they would like other public sector universities to adopt a similar curriculum and abandon the conventional curriculum system. He added that DUHS is willing to help the universities achieve this. He explained that the current curriculum system has been in use since Pakistan's inception.

Khan said they have documented the modular curriculum and will also make it available on the university's website very soon. While discussing the benefits of this particular system of education, he said that the curriculum has helped their students secure better results in the United States Medical Licencing Examination and Fellow of College of Physicians and Surgeons examination. Furthermore, it has enhanced their abilities to learn more in the field of medical sciences, he added.

Khan said, "Now is the time to move further and adopt this system, which has also been adopted by institutions in the USA, UK and Europe". He added that the USA has announced that after 2025 colleges not following this modular format will not be recognised internationally and their graduates will not be able to secure employment abroad.

"We would like to train the faculty of other medical universities about this integrated curriculum and will hold training workshops for them," he said. "It is a time-tested curriculum and we have removed all the hiccups from it."

Dow Medical College principal Prof Junaid Ashraf explained that the new curriculum consists of courses with subject matter classified by organ systems rather than according to departments such as anatomy, physiology or biochemistry. In the new system, all the stages of the disease, ways of treatment and surgeries would be taught at the same time. Such a curriculum fosters professional development and is coupled with systematic and coherent development of clinical and communication skills, he said.

Prof Ashraf added that this integrated modular curriculum has been followed in the university since 2009 and two batches of students have already completed their MBBS following this curriculum.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 10^th, 2016.