Adding human and social sciences in the medical education

In 2005, the School of Medicine of Valparaíso started a curricular innovation process. The purpose of this reform is to give a more humanistic and better quality education to develop competences for the future physicians, enabling them to adapt to new contexts of professional labor.
To know the impact of this reform in adding human and social sciences to their curriculum, this work makes a before/after analysis of these changes. A full program revision was made, including courses from first to fifth year of education, in 2001 and 2007. Contents and devoted time (measured in hours), were identified.
In 2001, 45 courses were evaluated, of which 11 had the searched for contents (24,4%of courses and 3,2% of total time). In 2007, 33 programs were evaluated, with 12 having this kind of contents (36,4% of courses and 9,9% of total time). The proportion of courses with human and social sciences is highest in the first three years of studies (4,6%of scheduled hours in 2001 and 14,1% in 2007). Qualitative research contents were not found in 2001, however in 2007 this issue is include in the Scientific Methodology course in the third year.
Statistical analysis shows that the differences in the % of hours dedicated to the target contents,  from 1st to 5th year and from 1^st to 3^rd, between 2001 and 2007, have highly significant (p<0,001).
We conclude that the curricular innovation process has a greater impact in including human and social sciences in medical education, achieving better competences for adaptation to new contexts of professional labor.