The effect of a required residency based student clerkship on resident selection

Over the past decade, the Department of Family Medicine at Jefferson Medical College has used a network of seven residency-based family practice centers each year to teach 223 third-year medical students in their required family medicine clerkship. A comparison of these affiliated residency programs with a control group of the other family medicine residency programs in Pennsylvania and Delaware (with minimal third-year teaching responsibilities) from 1976 to 1984 has shown that the affiliated programs had a significantly higher National Residency Matching Program (NRMP) fill rate (92% v. 77%), had a higher percentage of programs with fill rates above the national average (71% v. 41%), and filled their full complement of residents more often (82% v. 52%) than the control programs. This success in residency recruitment was due in part to the fact that the affiliated programs filled one-third of their positions with Jefferson graduates, three times the percentage found in the control programs. For family medicine residency programs, teaching third-year medical students in a required clerkship offers a major opportunity to improve their residency selection results in the NRMP.