A Tool to Develop and Monitor Collective Health Education in Medical School

ABSTRACT Introduction The new National Curriculum Guidelines of the undergraduate medical course (DCN-2014) emphasize collective health as a way to ensure social commitment in medical education. However, they do not clearly indicate the skills to be acquired and content to be worked in this field. This gap needs to be filled, given the need to guide the vast number of new medical courses, which followed the “More Doctors” policy in Brazil. Objective To identify the challenges of collective health in medical education and to build a strategic planning tool to support medical schools in designing and monitoring this component of the curriculum of their courses. Method The method comprised two stages: 1) critical analysis of key medical education documents (DCN and REVALIDA Matrix) and 2) construction of a strategic planning tool to support the development of the collective health curriculum in undergraduate programs by conducting workshops using the “outcome mapping method’. Results The documents analyzed disclose great variability in the understanding of the collective health role in medical training and practice. While the REVALIDA Matrix, published in 2009, establishes the 5 medical areas with no reference to collective health, the DCN, published in 2014, seems to overestimate this field. However, since there is no clear definition of skills and content, collective health often suffers from reductionism and seems to be mistaken by or overlap with family and community medicine. The participatory workshops took on the challenge of reversing this reductionist vision, building a tool based on the physician’s vision in the future, with the mission of requiring collective health skills and contents in the curriculum. Partners have been identified for the implementation of this component, as well as the attitudes and changes expected from each partner, and how to monitor their progress. Conclusion The tool, based on the outcome mapping method, focuses on people’s achievements and changes. It is a flexible, participatory device and can contribute to the construction of curricula that will train physicians committed to the social reality.