[Evaluation of the educational curriculum in psychosocial fields and general medicine in human medicine subjects--results of a total Germany pilot study in the 1995 summer semester].

With the discussion of the quality of medical education in Germany the importance of evaluating the curriculum has grown. A working group of representatives of the German scientific societies for general medicine and the so-called "psychosocial" disciplines in medical education had adapted a questionnaire from Harvard Medical School and tested this version for the first time in summer 1995. 56 teachers and 1250 students took part in this pilot study. The instrument proved to be sufficiently valid to evaluate the quality of different types of teaching lessons. The disciplines (Medical Sociology, Medical Psychology, Social Medicine, General Medicine, Psychotherapy/Psychosomatics) were valued equally with concern to their relevance for medical education. They got significantly better values for quality of teaching and teaching engagement of the professors. It is recommended to notice these results in the actual debate on the reform of the medical curriculum and to include other disciplines in further evaluative investigations.