Background: Clinical reasoning is the most important competente in the training process of a physician.
Aim: To develop a method for teaching clinical reasoning based on prototypes of clinical cases.
Material and methods: The study was conducted on sixty-four third year medical students. The study and control groups attended lectures and tutorial sessions with patients. The study group attended additionally discussion seminars of prototypical clinical cases. A clinical reasoning test was applied at the start and end of the learning period to both groups. At the end of the study, the opinions of students of the study group were collected in a focus group.
Results: After the learning period, both groups significantly increased their clinical reasoning skills. However, the improvement in the study group was more than double than that of the control group. The absolute improvement in the study group was 30.9%. Students interviewed in the focus group were unanimous in expressing their satisfaction in each and every aspect discussed.
Conclusions: The teaching of clinical reasoning to third year medical students by means of pattern recognition in seminars with clinical cases improved significantly their skills.