Standardizing the clinical content of a third-year family medicine clerkship.

Background: The increasing presence of family medicine as a required clinical experience during medical school has created a need to provide quality experiences for a large number of students. Use of community private practices is one way to address this need. An important issue with this approach is standardization of clinical content among diverse teaching sites. This paper investigates whether students on required one-month family medicine clerkships occurring at university and private practice sites obtain comparable experiences.
Methods: The experiences of 185 third-year medical students were compared in the following areas: patient volume, patient mix, and performance on end-of-clerkship oral and written examinations.
Results: Of the 20 core problems seen most frequently by students, four were seen by significantly different numbers of university and private practice students overall; only two remained significantly different when analysis was restricted to the second half of the reporting period. Differences between the number of university and private practice students seeing the minimum targeted number of patients per session were nonsignificant (P = .895), as were differences between the two groups' oral and written examination scores (P = .507 and P = .595, respectively).
Conclusions: We found that clinical content of a required third-year clerkship could be successfully standardized, as measured by patient volume, mix, and student performance on examinations.