Mapping and Evaluation of the Rehabilitation Medicine Curriculum in Undergraduate Medical Education at the Hannover Medical School for NKLM Competence-based Teaching Contents

Background:

Since 2015, the National Competency-based Learning Objective Catalogue in Medicine (NKLM) provides guidance for all medical faculties in Germany, in order to improve the quality of medical education and to focus on competency-based teaching. Aim of this study was to match the curricular teaching content and objectives of rehabilitation medicine for undergraduate medical education at the Hannover Medical School (MHH) with NKLM competence-based teaching contents.

Methods:

Mapping of teaching content and learning objectives of rehabilitation medicine against the NKLM was performed by the representative teaching staff in cooperation with the office of the Dean of Studies. For the mapping we used the web-based database MERlin.

Results:

Rehabilition medicine covers a total of 67/281 partial competencies and 101/1958 learning objectives, of which 66 are being examined. The highest proportion of learning objectives is taught on competency level 3 „capacity to act”. The primarily conveyed medical role is the role of the medical expert. The highest overlaps of learning objectives were shown with following subjects/modules: neurology (n = 33), physics and physiology (n = 31), diagnostic methods (n = 30), pain medicine (n = 27), anatomy (n = 23) and surgery (n = 21).

Conclusions:

For the first time, mapping enabled a specialized description of teaching content and learning objectives in rehabilitation medicine against a standardized reference tool. The presented methods allow a comparison with other modules/subjects within the own faculty. The results constitute the basis for a further development of the teaching content in rehabilitation medicine and for an intra-faculty discussion of the curriculum.

Keywords:

rehabilitation medicine, competency-based teaching, NKLM, mapping