[Assessing the impact of undergraduate internship in solving clinical problems]

Assess the impact of the undergraduate internship in the overall clinical competence and indicators on students who graduate from medical school.

We performed a prospective comparative study among 56 medical students enrolled in undergraduate internship at public secondary care hospitals. We administered an ad-hoc instrument used to measure clinical competence at the end of their undergraduate studies and internship. The instrument included twelve clinical cases with 320 questions. The response options were "true", "false" and "do not know." We used nonparametric statistics for the analysis

Clinical competence improved at the end of undergraduate internship, reaching 22% of students who scored in the middle range of the clinical aptitude scale. This result was not applicable to the end of medical school where 96% of the students scored in the lower ranges of clinical competence.

The rotation of medical students in secondary care hospitals significantly improves the clinical skills acquired during their medical training, although scores remain low.