Evidence-based medicine for undergraduate students from El Salvador: planning and execution of a short course in distance learning

• Grant number: 19/23597-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: March 01, 2020
• End date: February 28, 2021
• Field of knowledge: Health Sciences - Medicine
• Principal Investigator: Rachel Riera
• Grantee: Diego Fernando Martinez Palma
• Host Institution: Escola Paulista de Medicina (EPM). Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP). Campus São Paulo. São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

For some years now, the methods used by Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) have been part of the curriculum of undergraduate excellence health courses such as Oxford, UK, and McMaster, Canada. What methods are indispensable to attain at least two skills expected from a health professional: (a) construction of critical scientific thinking and (b) knowledge management, which must be continued throughout professional life. Thus, it is not surprising that many medical schools in Brazil sought to introduce EBM in the early years of the course. However, even with globalization and increasing access to information, awareness of the role of EBM in building these skills does not yet seem to be fully assimilated in many Latin American medical schools, whether public or private. The justifications for this are numerous and include socioeconomic factors, language barriers, lack of structured models to follow, and faculty not yet familiar with the content of the EBM. The undergraduate course at the Escola Paulista de Medicina (EPM), Universidade Federal de São Paulo (Unifesp), was the first medical course to include in its curriculum an MBE module, initially taught to 4th-grade students, with later expansion to the 1st and 3rd years, which contributed to the recognition of EPM as a cutting-edge center for MBE teaching and research in Brazil. Thus, through a scientific initiation project and with the collaboration of Unifesp's graduate students and researchers from the Oxford-Brazil EBM Alliance, we designed a distance learning EBM short-course to introduce EBM concepts. for medical students from Dr. José Matías Delgado University, the private university of El Salvador. The type of study will be a before-and-after study to assess the gain in knowledge of medical students after the distance learning course. Our main objectives are: (a) to disseminate MBE concepts among undergraduate students at an El Salvador college and (b) to promote collaborative activities among Brazilian and Salvadoran undergraduate medical students.