Clinical Curriculum (Year 3)

The third year begins with a one week “Transition to Clerkships” course, followed by required clerkships in Surgery, Internal Medicine, Obstetrics/Gynecology, Pediatrics, Psychiatry, and Family Medicine, and longitudinal clinical experience in Primary Care.  A four-week elective block is also included.  The longitudinal Doctoring curriculum runs concurrently with the clerkships.  

The block clerkships consist of a mixture of in-patient and ambulatory rotations on various services that provide in-depth, supervised patient care experiences.  Each clerkship includes required didactic sessions and interactive cases. 

The longitudinal primary care experience places students in primary care practices throughout the region every other week throughout the year.  Students are required to submit a quality improvement project relevant to their site.

The Doctoring 3 course consists of biweekly longitudinal small groups led by faculty members who remain with their group throughout the year as the students rotate through their clerkships.   Doctoring 3 themes include advanced interviewing techniques, clinical reasoning, clinical epidemiology, evidence-based medicine, and ethics/jurisprudence. 

Students use their four week elective block for clinical clerkships in fields that are not included in the required clerkships, but are highly relevant to any discipline, such as radiology and neurology.

Feedback and Assessment
Third year clerkships use a competency-based framework for clinical evaluations that assess third year milestones.  All of the clerkships use NBME shelf exams to assess knowledge and problem-solving.  A variety of other methods (observed clinical encounters, OSCE’s, Practice-based Learning and Improvement exercises) are designed to provide formative and summative feedback.