What is a CBL course?

Case Based Learning (CBL) is a type of curriculum framework adopted by a number of medical schools across the country. In a CBL medical course, medical students are given a number of clinical cases which span a wide array of important medical conditions which will be covered throughout the academic year. A “case” is a clinical scenario presented to a group of medical students which paints a picture of a patient with an underlying medical condition. The students will then talk through the case, discussing their opinions on various items relating to the case, such as their suspected diagnosis, the underlying physiology of the diagnosis, their management plan etc before answering a series of questions related to the case. The sessions are often overseen by two Doctors who are involved in the field of medicine to which the case is about, e.g. A CBL session about Asthma would be led by two respiratory Consultants. CBL aims to provide a structure to learning about medical diseases by asking questions, which when answered will help to provide a greater understanding of that particular medical condition. The benefits of CBL include that it promotes working as a team which is obviously very important when working as a Doctor whilst it also helps to highlight gaps in knowledge of a particular disease. CBL also comes with a number of downfalls, to give one example, only a certain number of medical conditions will be covered in CBL sessions throughout the year simply due to the inability to cover all diseases in such little time. I believe that CBL based courses do work very well for some people and it is so important to put some time into reading more around what curriculum certain medical schools participate in before applying so that you can find out which course is best tailored to your own learning style!