Students evaluation of a traditional and an innovative family medicine course in Saudi Arabia.

This study compares students' evaluation of a traditional and an innovative undergraduate family medicine (FM) courses. The old curriculum was traditional and teacher-centered. Changes in-line with the innovative learning concepts were introduced. While innovative course (IC) students had significant improvement in both their attitude towards innovative learning methods and self-assessment of knowledge, traditional course students had improvement only in self-assessment of knowledge. Students in both courses did not show post-cycle improvement in perception of their own skills and were dissatisfied with the Health Center (HC) tutors' training. The need to recruit trained family physicians at the affiliated HC became evident. IC students valued the exercise of adding their generated learning needs as part of the curriculum. Other lessons learned were presented. We hope that findings of this study would encourage medical colleges in the region to critically review their FM courses.