Till Johannes Bugaj

1. Introduction Pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) is a rare disease in which patients suffer from progressive loss of their pulmonary vascular bed, leading to elevated pressure in the pulmonary circulation and subsequent right heart failure [1]. Usually, PAH patients are clinically classified according to the New York Heart Association (NYHA) categorization, in four stages depending on the degree of dyspnea in relation to the activity level (NYHA level I–IV).

Materials and methods Course and study description The study was performed in the biochemistry seminar ‘From Gene to Protein’, a mandatory seminar for second semester medical students at Ulm University, Germany.4 The seminar was taught by one lecturer (SJK or MK) to 16 classes of about 20 students each and was held in an inverted classroom setting in which students studied online on their own before attending on-site learning.

To our best knowledge, this is the first study to (1) descriptively assess the status of FYMS’ objective competencies in four highly relevant clinical activities in a work-place scenario, (2) to examine changes across the course of their 16-week clinical Internal Medicine rotation, and (3) to gain first insight in FYMS’ clinical competence performance level.