CLINICAL CASES AS A TOOL TO ENHANCE IMMUNOLOGY KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION: IMPROVING THEACHING METHODS IN MEDICAL GRADUATION

Introduction and objectives: It is expected that, since early stages of their academic formation, doctors realize how importante it is to analise a patient inside a health-disease context, besides having a solid scientific knowledge and a good humanistic formation. Thus, it is necessary that they can apply what they learned in the basic cicle into the medical practice, and an excelent tool for that is the clinical case. Keeping that in mind, the monitors of the imunology discipline for medical graduation and the guiding teachers, developed clinical cases activities in order to test the applicability of this tool as a teaching method. Method: 23 students of the immunology module were gathered in a class in a presence of one monitor, who presented them a clinical case, which was divided in three parts: anamnesis and physical exam; complementary exams and immune mechanisms applied to the signs and symptoms of the patient. After each part, the students discussed among them the informations they were given. Then, they answered some questions about this activity they had just done. Ethical principles were obeyed. Results and conclusions: Everyone that participated in the study agreed that it is an effective learning tool, capable of enhancing the knowledge acquisition, but only 39,1% revealed interest in searching clinical cases during their studies. This results showed that its necessary to encourage the students to look forward into solving clinical cases as a way to improve their assimilation of the subject and to integrate them into the medical practice.