Clinical reasoning sessions: back to the patient

Problem-based learning (PBL) was developed as a facilitated small group learning process based around a clinical problem. Originally designed for pre-clinical years of medical education, its application across all years poses a number of difficulties, including the risk of reducing patient contact, providing a learning process that is skewed towards an understanding of pathophysiological processes, which may not be well understood in all areas of medicine, and failing to provide exposure to clinically relevant reasoning skills.