How to Ace PBL (Problem Based Learning) at Medical School UK

hi everyone my name's alex and welcome back to another video and this is another video about medical school and specifically how to do pbl so pbl is problem-based learning and more and more universities are starting to adopt this style of learning and it's proven to be really beneficial the overall idea of pbl is that you start off with a problem or clinical scenario and you then have to answer a question or learning objective based around this and then you have to teach what you've learned and what you've researched to answer the learning objective to the rest of your group obviously it will vary quite significantly um depending on what university you're at but yeah this is just sort of a general overview from the perspective of uea student obviously it's going to vary as well because of covid so it might be online you might actually get to do it in person it might be via zoom it really will vary so this is just a bit of an overall guide so the first step in pbl is the clinical scenario you'll be given a clinical scenario written by your medical school and it will be accompanied by questions or learning objectives which fit around the clinical scenario for each person to answer so you'll start off by going through the clinical scenario as a group and trying to understand what's going on sort of brainstorming any ideas that you currently currently have about what's going on before the teaching is delivered and writing down anything you don't know or want answering or want clarifying so there might be a disease which you've never heard of there might be words you don't understand or drugs you've never heard of or it might be like interpreting some test results that you want to find out more about so once you've got all of the questions and things that your group need to find out once you've got the questions your medical school have set you you need to divide them up between you in this first step as well it's a good opportunity to sort of work through your clinical reasoning as well obviously it will depend on the cases and how they're written but often it will go from the first presentation of a condition through to seeing the gp or secondary care so you can try to work out what's going on using your current knowledge right from the start so right from that first presentation you can try and work out um all the way through to the end and if you get things wrong it doesn't matter because obviously you've not been taught any of the content yet so you'll be able to go through that in the following week so the second step is researching so once you've been assigned your learning objective or questions that you've got to answer you need to go away and research them so you can use a variety of different sources for this so at most universities what you need to know will be covered in the lectures so it's a good idea to start with the lectures and make sure that what you're doing doesn't contradict the lectures but don't just base your research off the lectures because obviously your whole group's going to go to them so when you come back to teach them later on no one's going to have gained anything from it yeah lectures are a good place to start and a good sort of guide but i always start off with a google search so just googling it just to get a general gist of what's going on just so you understand the overall picture and then once you've done that you can find some good sources so the nhs website is always a good start and that will give you a sort of overview from a patient's perspective and then there's lots of different websites of giving information from a doctor's perspective so the internet's good um youtube videos are particularly good if you don't understand something i use them quite a lot in the end but um it's difficult to reference youtube videos so if you can use it to get the overall understanding and then find more information elsewhere then that's always good academic journals can be good but it can be difficult to sift through all the information on there especially at the start textbooks are also another good option for research um so these can be quite good for getting any extra little bits of information but yeah all the researching is up to you as to where you get your information from but this is the crucial thing you must remember to reference everything properly so use either harvard or vancouver for medical school other different schools use various different referencing referencing methods but harvard or vancouver you can't go wrong in medical school in order to reference it's a good idea to use a reference manager so the most simple form of these is a website called cite this for me which is just a website so you can like copy and paste a website link into sites for me and it will generate a reference or you can just search for various academic journals and it will automatically create the reference for you and create your bibliography which you can then just copy and paste at the end of your word document and then slightly more integrated reference managers are things like mendeley so this is a word plugin and also a chrome plugin i think and you can just click on the chrome plugin to upload it to your mendeley then when you want to cite it in a word document you'll just click on the mendeley button at the top and you'll be able to insert that reference and it will create the bibliography at the end for you it can be really good um it can be a bit buggy sometimes but it's definitely worth a go um i've i've used it quite a lot and found it really useful so once you've done your research you need to compile what you've learned and what you've researched into a document that other people can learn from so using colors is a good idea setting things up with good headings is really important explaining things in an easy to understand way and making things concise as well because the people in your group aren't going to be wanting to read pages and pages and pages of your notes they're going to want to see simple explanations and they want it to be concise as well so trying to stick to no more than really two a4 sides only go over if you have two it's a really big topic but two a4 sides is often a good guide so for me i quite like to include a load of questions at the bottom of my of my work so the rest of my group could use those questions as part of their learning so yeah that's the researching and the write-up bit and the last bit is presenting so in the following week's pbl session what you'll need to do is present your research to the rest of your group and it's often a good idea to do this um with reference to the case from the previous week so relating what you've researched back to the case is something which a lot of people find really helps and it really adds to that sort of problem solving which pbl is really really good for with uea we saw the same characters appear in each case week after week so by relating things back to the case we could relate the learning with a character and different point throughout the year which was really useful to learn from so your presentation can take any form it can be a powerpoint presentation in its most simple terms you can just talk it through if you really want to aunt asking your group questions is something which i really like to do so um i'd have a little quiz some people did cahoots which were great um there were loads of really inventive games which taught the rest of the group um the content that they've been researching throughout the week this is also a really good chance for the rest of your group to ask you questions about what you've been researching so perhaps if they don't quite understand something because you've done more research into it you will you might perhaps be able to answer their questions for them one of the reasons i really like pbl is because everyone does their own thing and learning from other people and having things explained by people your own age and in the same situation as you is often a much better way of learning things and having things explained by lecturers it also means that you actually have to really engage with the content on your syllabus rather than just sit there in a lecture and just let the lecturer's words fly over your head so yeah that's how to do pbl um if you have any questions please leave them in the comments section down below thanks for watching remember to like and subscribe and i will see you in the next video

Channel: Alex Florance

Views: 1,439

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: How to ace PBL (Problem Based Learning) at Medical School UK, PBL, Medical School, Med school, UEA, University of East Anglia, Med school tips, UK Medical school, Study tips, University, beginners’ guide to PBL, Problem based learning

Id: lNvplC8NPZQ

Length: 8min 43sec (523 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 18 2020