To cultivated competent clinicians with the potential to be future pillars and leaders is the educational objective of an 8-year medical program at the West China School of Medicine, Sichuan University. Problem-based learning (PBL) is more effective than traditional, passive, didactic teaching in training of communication skills, information management and critical thinking and research. These are included in the Global Minimum Essential Requirements in Medical Education (GMER). We introduce our practice of PBL as a separate course for the 8-year medical program, including its design, preparation, implementation and evaluation. We discuss why it is designed as a separate course and implemented in multiple semesters with fewer cases in each semester. The move from giving a fish to people to teaching people how to fish, and from teacher-centered to student-centered teaching is a radical transformation of educational concepts and the traditional teaching-and-learning model. Such a change cannot happen in a single step and we hope that this model PBL course, focusing on training in methods and skills, will facilitate the concept transformation and the involvement of all our teachers and students. This should help our teaching to evolve continuously, develop a system for evaluating PBL and lead to the gradual incorporation of PBL into our discipline-based courses or organ system-based courses.