Is somebody able to give me a bit of a summary about the strengths and weaknesses of PBL versus CBL versus integrated.
Unfortunately, like "integrated" and "early clinical experience", terms like PBL (problem-based learning) and CBL (case-based learning) can mean whatever an individual institution wants them to mean. What Bristol medical school calls CBL, for example, isn't what I would call CBL.
Broadly, it goes like this...
In PBL, students are given a clinical scenario ("problem", although the word is misleading) that raises a number of points that students need to learn in order to understand what's going on. For example, you might have a patient calling 999 because he has chest pains, being picked up by an ambulance, in which an ECG reveals ST segment elevation, arriving at hospital, having blood samples taken for tests, receiving reperfusion therapy (alteplase or percutaneous coronary intervention), being monitored, having blood test results reported/interpreted, having drugs prescribed, being discharged from hospital and being referred to specialist clinics. Students then have to come up with an explanation of what was happening at each stage (e.g. how the infarct arose, what risk factors the patient had, etc.), why particular tests were performed, why particular treatments were used, and so on. It makes everything directly relevant to clinical practice but some students dislike it because they're not directly told what to learn.
CBL uses clinical cases - which might be real or made-up - with patient documentation, test results, radiological images, etc. Depending on the stage at which it's being used, this might either (a) form the basis for a process like PBL, where students have to find out what all the stuff they've been given means and how it would be used in forming a diagnosis and management plan, or (b) provide triggers for students to identify patients on the ward with similar presentations and go through their history, examination, diagnosis, etc., to see how such patients are managed in real life and what differential diagnoses might be possible for similar presentations. At a much more basic level, students might just be given a case and a set of questions related to it, which they then have to answer on the basis of their lectures and other learning activities through the week.
The point of both is to get students into the habit of reasoning rather than recalling. Although it's might appear straightforward to apply a recall-based approach to diagnosing a patient with chest pains, being able to do it without potentially missing important details really requires them to be reasoning through very basic questions like: what are the structures in the chest? which of these have sensory nerves (and therefore might be hurting)? what could cause these to hurt (including damage to neighbouring tissues that don't have sensory nerves)? and so on. Practising clinicians don't do this consciously or visibly/audibly, but their reasoning is based on their long experience of applying knowledge of anatomy & physiology, considering a full range of possible differentials, working out which can be excluded on the basis of available evidence and which need to be tested for, etc. Doctors might do it almost subconsciously but they do it. Students need to work their way up to this by doing it consciously, and explaining what they're doing.