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Students entering the David Geffen School of Medicine this August will be the first at UCLA taught under a new curriculum – one whose focus is on bodily systems and whose design diverges sharply from the curriculum taught at the medical school for over a decade.

The change in curriculum comes after an extensive review jump-started by a 1996 faculty-student retreat that evaluated existing curriculum, said Tomas Ganz, chairman of the Faculty Executive Committee that approved the change.

“Many of us philosophically decided we would like to teach things in a different way that would make more sense,” he said.

Under the new curriculum, Ganz said the first two years of medical school will be divided into units with a heavy focus on the bodily systems.

A unit on the respiratory system would teach students about the anatomy of the lungs and bronchi, the biochemistry and physiology of the respiratory system and the infections in the lungs.

Under the old curriculum, units center on individual disciplines like anatomy or biochemistry, so the respiratory system is discussed several times, with each unit focusing on only one aspect of it, said Margaret Stuber, co-chairwoman of the Medical Education Committee that is overseeing the curriculum change.

“The major advantage of the new curriculum is that it encourages students to integrate all of the information they are learning, rather than learning one component at a time and having to integrate it on their own,” she said.

Ganz added that the concept of integration will be reflected in students’ exams – questions about the anatomy of the heart or the biochemistry of how it contracts might be replaced by ones asking what could be done to fix a patient’s heart problem.

“When we encounter a patient with the illness we don’t separately think of the anatomy, the biology, the physiology,” he said. “It requires an integrated approach, and that is the way we will teach the material for the first time … the way we actually use it.”

But it isn’t just out with the old and in with the new. Next year’s medical school faculty will teach two curricula simultaneously – the new curriculum to incoming students and the old curriculum to students entering their second years.

Departments whose material will be taught to both first-years and second-years may be “stretched,” said John Tormey, Medical Education Committee co-chairman.

Some departments are coming up with “creative ways” to address the transition, Stuber added.

“Since internal medicine will be teaching physical examination to second-years at the same time as to the first-years, some of the people from surgery are going to be helping with the teaching,” she said.

Microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics professor Lawrence Feldman said “double-teaching” next year won’t impact quality of education.

“That affects me, not the students,” he said.

Allen Ho, who just completed his second year under the medical school’s old curriculum, said though he believes the new curriculum is a “step in the right direction,” the existing curriculum has its benefits.

“The old curriculum is good because it’s safe, because there’s so many classes that have gone through it,” he said. “It’s tried and true.”

One difficulty in implementing the new curriculum, Ganz said, will be assessing its advantages.

“The problem is that medical students are highly motivated people regardless of how we teach them, so we can’t really look at the exams and (say), ‘are they doing better now?’” he said.

And though the change in curriculum is permanent, Ganz said mid-year adjustments will be made as faculty and students see fit.

Ganz added that UCLA is in no way leading the charge – schools including Harvard and UC San Francisco have made similar shifts in their curricula.

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