Excursions into medical fields of activity at the Hannover Medical School: conception, realization and an evaluation over four years

At the Hannover Medical School excursions into fields of medical activity include four elements: a lecture introducing the full range of fields of medical practice to all students, preparatory seminars for students after having chosen a special field (general medicine, public health agency, medical certification, medicine of addiction, industrial medicine, social psychiatry, medicine in prisons, social pediatrics, and forensic medicine), the practical part and a concluding seminar including an evaluation of the whole course program.In the present paper the results of evaluations over four years are described. Detailed findings are presented for the preparatory seminars, for the practical part, for the concluding seminars, and for a summary measure reflecting the general judgement of the students.After the end of the concluding seminars standardized questionnaires had to be completed, and 977 students returned them. The questionnaire covers a large number of aspects of the course. The statistical analyses are performed by means of nonparametric rank-ordering procedures and a regression analysis that also includes the general lecture.The general medicine program consistently got the highest rankings, followed by the public health agencies and industrial medicine. With the exception of industrial medicine the rankings of the preparatory and the concluding seminars are varying over the four years considered. Highly consistent rankings emerged for the practices and institutions that had been visited by the students. Furthermore, the analyses suggest that fields that had attracted particular interest before registration did not necessarily also obtained the highest rankings.The results of the regression analyses suggest that the concluding seminars and the general introducing lecture can be abolished since their didactic functions had not been apparent to the students