Application of PBL method in the Practice Teaching of General Surgery

General surgery is the basis of surgery and different from internal medicine due to its most important features, such as more skills and operation required for it. The practice of general surgery is crucial for medical students. The application of problem-based learning (PBL) is one of the important teaching methods for the clinical practice teaching in general surgery. In this study, five-year clinical medical students who were practicing in department of general surgery in our hospital were randomly divided into a PBL teaching group and a traditional teaching group, and the students' learning motivation, teaching satisfaction with PBL method, self-evaluation and knowledge acquisition were investigated. The results showed that the students' learning motivation, teaching satisfaction for the teaching, self-evaluation and knowledge acquisition in the PBL teaching group were significantly higher than those in the traditional education group, indicating that the teaching effect with PBL teaching method should be good and PBL method should be feasible. Medical students have accepted the education in the basic medical theory and clinical knowledge before their clinical practice, but they are lack of the perceptual knowledge to the clinical knowledge and the ability to solve clinical and practical problem, as well as medical clinical skills. Although the period of clinical practice is not so long, it plays an important role in training medical students to become future qualified doctors as a link between the basics medicine and the clinical medicine, an important part of medical students learning career, and a clinical practice stage of the transition from the medical theory to the clinical practice and combining the theory with the clinical practice. General surgery is the basis of surgery and it is different from internal medicine due to one of its most important features, that is, more skills and operation required in surgery, especially in general surgery, so that you can often find many shortcomings of intern doctors worked at department of general surgery during the clinical teaching. This requires that teachers (physicians) responsible for the clinical teaching should guide them to correctly grasp and understand the practice in department of general surgery by paying more attention to the teaching " direction" and " key points" for helping the students successfully complete their learning task in the clinical practice. In 1969, Howard Barrows, a neurology professor from the United States, created the problem-based learning (PBL) method at McMaster University in Canada, namely a learning model in which students lean something centered on problems or based on problems [1-2]. PBL has been applied in various fields of many colleges and universities, and attached importance to widely in the medical educational world. During the long-term clinical teaching process of students' practice, we have made some attempts in the teaching of general surgery with PBL method based on the teaching reform and practice in our hospital, and achieved initial results. In this study, our thinking and practice in the application of PBL in the clinical practice teaching of general surgery are investigated.