Specialties chosen by medical students who participated in a student-run, community-based free clinic

Since 1974 the Hispanic medical and premedical students at the University of California, Davis, have operated a free clinic in a Hispanic community in Sacramento with the support and assistance of the family practice department. Using National Residency Matching Program data for the years 1978-1982, we compared the specialties selected by the students who had participated in Clinica Tepati for elective credit with those selected by all other graduating students. Almost all of the Clinica Tepati students (96.5 percent) selected one of the primary care specialties--family practice, pediatrics, and internal medicine--with 55.2 percent selecting family practice. These specialty choices of the Clinica Tepati students were significantly different from those of the other students. No cause-and-effect relationship can be determined when studying a self-selected group of students, yet the large percentage of the Clinica Tepati students selecting primary care does point toward such community-oriented experiences having some value in motivating or reinforcing a student's choice of primary care as a career goal.