Search

Objectives: The aim of this paper is to present the development of a longitudinal curriculum for medical students that is rooted in the particularity of the medical sciences and that aims to build and strengthen medical students’ scientific skills and use thereof in clinical practice. Methods: The curriculum development was initiated based on students’ feedback on the initial curriculum. To improve and expand the curriculum appropriately, a needs assessment, a literature review to define science specific to the medical sciences and practice, and an analysis of national and international curricula were performed. The curriculum development followed the PDCA cycle (Plan-Do-Check-Act).Results: The curriculum extends across the entire medical study programme from semesters 1 to 10. It consists of the seminar series on basic conduct and the epistemological groundings of science, scientific methods in medical research and health sciences, statistics and the scientific internship. Up to the sixth semester, the focus is on the acquisition of skills and abilities to work on and carry out a concrete research project; starting in semester seven, the critical evaluation and application of research results in everyday clinical practice are introduced. The curriculum is taught by epidemiologists, anthropologists, statisticians and public health scholars. Starting in semester seven, seminars are generally taught together with clinicians as tandem teaching. The curriculum is regularly assessed and adjusted. Conclusions: The Brandenburg Scientific Curriculum can be seen as a model of a longitudinal curriculum to teach scientific thinking and acting. One that is at the same time highly integrated in the medical curriculum overall. A central coordination point seems to be necessary to coordinate the teaching content and to ensure that teachers are interconnected. Furthermore, a complex curriculum in scientific methodology requires a set of teachers from a range of disciplinary backgrounds. To ensure equally high-quality education, the variability of research projects and faculty must be taken into account by establishing generally applicable evaluation criteria and fostering faculty development, and providing all students supporting courses throughout the research project.

Epidemiological cohort studies are a central research design in public health which appeal to, and can reinforce, specific ideas of the nation, sociality and the 'good' citizen. The concept of publics, the sociology of expectations and a co-productionist framework provide the theoretical frame to investigate how popular representations of two cohort studies, German National Cohort and UK Biobank, attempt to enrol a concerned public. By constructing promissory publics, cohort studies produce morally charged visions of health research and civic engagement as normative social practices. Promissory publics straddle the population and the citizen, the nation and the region, the future and the past, thus adding nuance to existing conceptual approaches. The publics of cohort studies are bolstered by the care practices of predominantly female staff, functioning as a performance of social recognition in lieu of an immediate beneficiary of research participation. Through these processes, popular representations of cohort studies intervene into much broacher visions of society and its anticipated futures, co-producing socially dominant and morally charged projections of sociality as well as health. The production of such publics thereby draws boundaries between members of the public and those practices enacted as endangering civic values. As such, cohort studies may have much broader socio-cultural ramifications that could reinforce old or reintroduce new lines of inclusion or exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a two-year ethnography of care practices during the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany, we discuss the affordances of voice-based technologies (smartphones, basic mobile phones, and landline telephones) in collecting ethnographic data and crafting relationships with participants. We illustrate how such technologies allowed us to move with participants, eased data collection through the social expectations around their use, and reoriented our attention to the multiple qualities of sound. Adapting research on the performativity of technology, we argue that voice-based technologies integrated us into participants' everyday lives while also maintaining physical distance in times of infectious sociality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]