title: Teaching community medicine to medical undergraduates-learning by doing: our experience of rural posting at All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, India.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  The goal of medical education is to ensure that the medical graduate has acquired broad public health competencies needed to solve the health problems of the community. We present the current teaching of community medicine to medical students of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi during their 5-week posting at the rural centre at Ballabgarh, Haryana.
  
  
  METHODS
  The teaching activities consist of field visits to different levels of health facilities and meeting with health workers, epidemiological exercises, a community-based exercise, posting in inpatient and outpatient departments of a secondary hospital, and domiciliary visits to families of patients. These are spread over 80 sessions of about 200 hours. There is very little didactic teaching and the assessment is broad-based. The evaluation of the posting was based on comparison of blinded pre- and post-posting assessments as well as anonymous feedback of the posting by the students.
  
  
  RESULTS
  There was a significant increase in the mean scores of all components of the posting-epidemiology (5.1 to 8.4), health systems (6.8 to 9.3) and clinical (8.0 to 10.8). The posting did not result in a better understanding of a public health approach as compared to a clinical approach. The feedback provided by students was generally positive for all activities with 94% of them rating it as good or very good.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The teaching of community medicine can be made more practical and interesting without compromising on learning. However, despite such a programme, getting medical students to develop a public health approach is a daunting task.
authors: All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Ansari Nagar, New Delhi 110029, India- Centre for Community Medicine.
authors: A
authors: A
authors: Krishnan
authors: All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Ansari Nagar, New Delhi 110029, India- Centre for Community Medicine.
authors: P
authors: P
authors: Misra
authors: All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Ansari Nagar, New Delhi 110029, India- Centre for Community Medicine.
authors: S K
authors: SK
authors: Rai
authors: All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Ansari Nagar, New Delhi 110029, India- Centre for Community Medicine.
authors: S K
authors: SK
authors: Gupta
authors: All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Ansari Nagar, New Delhi 110029, India- Centre for Community Medicine.
authors: C S
authors: CS
authors: Pandav
mesh_terms: D002982:Clinical Clerkship; D003154:Community Medicine / Q000193:education*; D004504:Education, Medical, Undergraduate; D006801:Humans; D007194:India; D019035:Rural Health Services; D012577:Schools, Medical