Integration of Different Disciplines in Medicine: A Vertical Integrated Teaching Session for Undergraduate Medical Students

Introduction: The medical course is very vast and disciplines are covered in different phases. Most of the teaching methods are didactic and conducted by individual disciplines; that’s why students fail to see the relevance of different disciplines and do not develop the required skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, and decision making. Solution to this is integrated teaching by various disciplines. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted among VI semester MBBS students and all the students who attended the class were included, using universal sampling. A descriptive analysis of the feedback was done for the students at the end of an integrated teaching session to assess the perceptions of students towards a new method of integrated teaching. A handout with all the relevant information was shared with the students as the study material. The results were presented in percentages. Results: Ninety seven percent of the students stated that the objective of the session was achieved. Most of the students (92.7%) believed that they had learned new skills which would be applicable in future practice. Most of the students (42.3%) appreciated the problem solving session followed by all the sessions equally (20.7%). Around 97.3% of the students shared that the handouts produced them with valuable information to support the session, and 92.8% of them gave feedback that they would use it in future as a reference material. Conclusion: The current descriptive analysis shows that students appreciated and enjoyed this new method of teaching learning session with the problem solving section as the most appreciated part of the integrated teaching session. The handout was well appreciated and utilized as a reference material during the session and students were also interested in using the same in future as a reference material.