To cultivated competent clinicians with the potential to be future pillars and leaders is the educational objective of an 8-year medical program at the West China School of Medicine, Sichuan University. Problem-based learning (PBL) is more effective than traditional, passive, didactic teaching in training of communication skills, information management and critical thinking and research. These are included in the Global Minimum Essential Requirements in Medical Education (GMER). We introduce our practice of PBL as a separate course for the 8-year medical program, including its design, preparation, implementation and evaluation. We discuss why it is designed as a separate course and implemented in multiple semesters with fewer cases in each semester. The move from giving a fish to people to teaching people how to fish, and from teacher-centered to student-centered teaching is a radical transformation of educational concepts and the traditional teaching-and-learning model. Such a change cannot happen in a single step and we hope that this model PBL course, focusing on training in methods and skills, will facilitate the concept transformation and the involvement of all our teachers and students. This should help our teaching to evolve continuously, develop a system for evaluating PBL and lead to the gradual incorporation of PBL into our discipline-based courses or organ system-based courses.
Evidence-based medicine is the methodology of modern clinical research and plays an important role in guiding clinical practice. It has become an integral part of medical education. In the digital age, evidence-based medicine has evolved to incorporate innovative research models that utilize multimodal clinical big data and artificial intelligence methods. These advancements aim to address the challenges posed by diverse research questions, data methods, and evidence sources. However, the current teaching content in medical schools often fails to keep pace with the rapidly evolving disciplines, impeding students' comprehensive understanding of the discipline's knowledge system, cutting-edge theories, and development directions. In this regard, this article takes the opportunity of graduate curriculum reform to incorporate real-world data research, artificial intelligence, and bioinformatics into the existing evidence-based medicine curriculum, and explores the reform of evidence-based medicine teaching in the information age. The aim is to enable students to truly understand the role and value of evidence-based medicine in the development of medicine, while possessing a solid theoretical foundation, a broad international perspective, and a keen research sense, in order to cultivate talents for the development of the evidence-based medicine discipline.