Third Year Clerkship

Introduction

Welcome to the Department of Family and Community Medicine’s Third Year Clerkship. The goal of this clerkship is to introduce you to the principles and practice of Family Medicine, and to provide you with the essential clinical skills and training that you will find useful in whichever specialty you choose to pursue.

Rather than defining the content of this course in terms of the setting, we have chosen to focus on the approach to the ambulatory patient. The clerkship’s activities are planned to introduce you to the skills, knowledge, and attitudes that all physicians need when treating patients in an ambulatory setting. The curriculum for this course focuses more on the process of evaluating and treating a new patient or problem. Core content will be addressed that is central to the acute, chronic, and preventive care that family physicians deliver. In addition, you will gain knowledge and skills in the specific areas relevant to the patients you see. While this will lead to a different experience for each student, all of you will be developing a framework within which you can initiate evaluation and care for any patient, regardless of clinical setting or problem, and do so in a fashion that fosters an ongoing relationship with the patient.

Goals and Objectives

The Goals of the Family Medicine Clerkship are for students to develop the skills, attitudes, and knowledge that constitute a good foundation in the family medicine and to apply ethical principles to the physician-patient relationship.

  1. By completion of this clerkship, students will be able to develop a primary care approach to the evaluation and management of patients with the thirty most common ambulatory family medicine problems.
  2. By the end of the clerkship, the student will be able to develop and refine the basic clinical skills that are essential to practicing effective medicine to the satisfaction of the attending physician. These include history- taking and physical examination skills, giving patient presentations and the interpretation of lab values.
  3. By completion of the clerkship, the student will be able to apply the principles of longitudinal and comprehensive health care, including consideration of familial, community, and cultural influences on health behavior.
  4. By the end of the clerkship, the student will be able to apply the principles of preventive medicine in a primary care setting to the satisfaction of the attending physician and evidenced by successful completion of the final examination.
  5. By the completion of the clerkship, the student will demonstrate professional values and attitudes, and learn how to apply ethical principles to the physician patient relationship.