A systemic review was also conducted to comprehensively evaluate community-based teaching in UK medical curricula on the domains of programme needs, implementation, impact, and cost. Methods Online survey An online survey of the current neverless provision of community-based teaching in UK medical curricula was completed by NC through
accessing official online material of medical schools between 31 November 2013 and 8 December 2013. An up-to-date list of all the registered medical schools was obtained from the Medical Schools Council (MSC) website on 31 November 2013.29 All graduate-entry courses were excluded. This was due to the wide variations of graduate-entry course structure, as well as the lack of literature on postgraduate community-based medical education. This was a prerequisite in order for the results of both the online survey and systematic review to be evaluated in parallel. Online material of the undergraduate medical curriculum was sourced using the Google search engine, and included content from university websites or online course prospectuses for the 2014 intake. The information search was specific to descriptions of both mandatory and elective components of the curriculum relating to ‘primary care’, ‘general practice’, or ‘community
medicine’. Systematic review: data sources A systematic literature review was conducted using the electronic databases PubMed and Web of Science to source for papers published on undergraduate community-based medical education. With the understanding that community-based education has evolved over the years, only publications published within the past 15 years, from November 1998 to 2013, were included in this study. The search criteria was (‘community-based’, ‘community-oriented’, ‘community involvement’, or; ‘primary health care’) and (‘medical curriculum’, ‘medical students’, ‘undergraduate medical education’ or ‘undergraduate medical school’).
Systematic review: selection criteria and data extraction The relevance of the articles was screened by the title and abstract, based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria. Articles were selected if Batimastat they described undergraduate medical education within the UK. Papers that included healthcare professionals apart from medical students were excluded. Any articles that were duplicated, not available in full text, or not published in English were also regarded as unsuitable for the review. In total, 29 peer-reviewed articles were identified as relevant, and were selected for further qualitative content analysis by SL and NT (see figure 1). Data on the following were extracted from each article: (1) Format of CBE; (2) Type of evaluation used to assess the programme; (3) Findings of this evaluation; and (4) Method of data collection. Rossi, Lipsey and Freeman’s (2004) approach to programme evaluation was adopted to systematically categorise the evaluation findings on CBE (see table 1).