Background: The pre-clerkship curriculum at McMaster University uses problem-based learning (PBL)  as  the  main  teaching  method  and  includes  patients  of  all  ages.  However,  informal  data collected through surveys sent to McMaster medical students demonstrated that our students do not feel adequately prepared for their pediatric clerkship rotation. The purpose of this study was to  map  the  McMaster  pediatric  pre-clerkship  PBL  curriculum  and  online  Aquifer  cases  to  the National Canuc-Paeds clinical presentations (https://www.pupdoc.ca/en/canuc-paeds/) to determine the comprehensiveness of our current pediatrics curriculum.

Methods: All 150 undergraduate  problem-based  learning  cases  were  reviewed  for  pediatric content. In  addition,  the  32  pediatric  Aquifer  cases  were  reviewed  to  determine  which  Canuc-Paeds clinical presentations are addressed.

Results: Thirty-six out of 150 PBL cases included pediatric content, in which15/29 of the required clinical presentations were covered, and many  were  addressed more than  once. The majority  of the objectives (25/29) were covered by at least one Aquifer case, while four objectives were not addressed by any case.

Conclusion: Mapping  pre-clerkship  PBL   cases  and  Aquifer cases onto the Canuc-Paeds curriculum provides valuable insight into the pediatrics content in the pre-clerkship and clerkship curriculum and demonstrates areas where additional training is required. A similar methodology can also be used in other programs to evaluate their curriculum.