Abstract Clinical teachers often complain that medical students have forgotten or somehow ‘‘lost’’ knowledge that has been taught at pre-clinical levels at the time of entering the clinical part of education. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore, whether transfer of knowledge was identified as a problem by the teaching staff of anatomy and surgery, and if so, what strategies they used to overcome it. Semi- structured interviews were conducted with ten medical teachers in anatomy and surgery. Most teachers recognised that there was a problem of transfer and some individuals had adopted strategies to address this. However, there was no formal educational strategy suggested to overcome the problem of transfer. The conclusion is that transfer needs to be addressed both by basic science teachers and clinical teachers. There is a need for a mutual educational discourse of the contexts students will face. Keywords Transfer Æ Student learning Æ Curriculum design Æ Teacher training Æ Undergraduate education Æ Medical education Introduction The experience in numerous medical schools that apply a discipline-based model of educational curriculum is that information learned in the basic science years is not easily activated in clinical situations. This is a classical problem within medical education, for instance in anatomy teaching, where previously learned knowledge about healthy and normal body structures is supposed to transform into patho- physiological explanations later in medical studies. K. Bolander Laksov (&) Æ K. Lonka Æ A. Josephson Learning, Informatics, Management & Ethics (LIME), Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm 177 00, Sweden e-mail: klara.bolander@ki.se K. Lonka LIME, Karolinska Institutet and Department of Applied Educational Sciences, University of Helsinki, P. O. Box 9, Helsinki Fin-00014, Finland e-mail: kirsti.lonka@helsinki.fi 123 Adv in Health Sci Educ (2008) 13:345–360 DOI 10.1007/s10459-006-9048-9 ORIGINAL PAPER How do medical teachers address the problem of transfer? Klara Bolander Laksov Æ Kirsti Lonka Æ Anna Josephson Received: 31 May 2006 / Accepted: 19 October 2006 / Published online: 3 January 2007 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2006