Teaching community diagnosis: experience of a new institution

Community diagnosis is one method of making medical education more community oriented and making the students learn and appreciate intellectual discovery and critical thinking.

Being a relatively young institution with constraints of manpower, finances and logistic support we proceeded to developed a short programme which would allow students to achieve the skills of community diagnosis.

Instead of a structured programme, we empowered the students to plan their own from meeting the villagers’ right up to developing and successfully implementing a health promotion campaign specially focused to the need of the villagers. The lecturers were present only to guide and supervise the students.

Self assessment by the students at the end of the programme showed improvement in all the five domains assessed i.e. change in knowledge, change in skills, leadership and team work, attitudes and perceptions and humanistic attributes. The paper outlines how a brief programme can achieve substantial gain in skills and attitudes.