Clinical skills acquired during a clerkship in family medicine

The authors report on their study of the perceived acquisition of clinical skills by 151 second-year students in six required clerkships: surgery, internal medicine, pediatrics, obstetrics-gynecology, psychiatry, and family medicine. The students completed self-assessments of their clinical skills concerning 78 problems or procedures when taking the family medicine clerkship as their first and last rotations and when taking any of the other clerkships as their first rotation. Fifty percent of the 36 students who took the family medicine clerkship after completing all five traditional clerkships reported that they learned the management of some of the most common health problems, including osteoarthritis and hypertension, only during the family medicine clerkship. Overall, the skills of these 36 students increased from 60 percent to 89 percent of the items surveyed after taking the family medicine clerkship as their last required rotation. The principal contributions of the family medicine clerkship were in the management of common problems, performance of therapeutic procedures, and recommendation of health maintenance procedures.