Clinical medical education in the nursing home: opportunities and limits

The nursing home has been proposed as a potential site for clinical medical education. Before medical schools can reasonably devote increasingly scarce resources to such an endeavor, questions of what the nursing home might uniquely provide to medical students and whether such experiences are really necessary must be clearly answered. Evidence is presented to support the development of the nursing home as a required clinical educational site. Analogies and differences between the current situation in the nursing home and the situation of the hospital in medical education in the early 20th century are explored as a means of understanding the potential and limits of the nursing home's role in medical education.