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Family Medicine Clerkship

  • Fatimah Alsaeed
  • Jun 3, 2018
  • 4 min read

Hi everyone I hope all of you are doing well In this post, I will share with you my experience of Family Medicine clerkship and the resources that I used during the 8 weeks of the clerkship.

This clerkship is the most calming and the most relaxing 8 weeks of the 5th year for me personally especially after pediatrics clerkship, and it was a very good start of the second semester. The clerkship was in the Family Medicine and Community Center inside the female campus of the IAU, and we had the whole building for us "as the only students there". A lot of the clinics are empty and you can use the computers there to study and do your work during breaks.

On the 1st day, we had a pre-test to assess our knowledge and we have been told that they will repeat it for us later. And then later in the 1st week, we divided ourselves into 12 groups, each group should present a topic "either tutorial or lecture" and attend the clinics together. The topics and clinic schedule has been divided by the coordinating doctor and updated weekly.


The weekly timetable is similar throughout the 8 weeks, so we had lectures and tutorials during the morning from 8 to 12 and clinics from 1 to 3. Also, we had clinics in the morning few times on Tuesdays.

The requirements during the clerkship include:

  • 5 short cases, which are brief history and physical examination of 5 different patients attended the clinics, you don't have to take the history and you don't have to perform the physical examination. You can listen to the doctor and fill the paper and let the doctor sign it for you.

  • 1 long case, for this you should sit with your patient and take full detailed history and perform a physical examination and suggest investigations and then present the case to the doctor who is responsible for the case. Make sure to do it as early as possible during your clerkship.

  • 8 peer assessments, this is an easy thing to do. Just let 8 of your classmates fill your papers.


  • 8 self-assessments, the same idea of the peer assessment, but now you will do it for yourself.

  • Reflective journal, very similar to the "ER reflective journal of pediatric clerkship".

  • Logbook, you should fill it for an agreed number of patients and for our F1 group it was between 45 to 60 patients.


For these requirements, I think you should start from the 1st week of the clerkship and make sure to finish before the 8th week, so you have time to study for the end of clerkship exam.

  • The logbook analysis, you should enter the data from your logbook into an excel sheet and find specific things like how many patients, age groups and most common problem encounter. Also, the presentation was at the 8th week and we divided into small groups with different doctors at the Family Medicine and Community Center Classes.

Here the link to the analysis paper:


Exams

We had two exams during the clerkship, middle of clerkship exam and end of clerkship exam. The 1st exam was at the 5th week of the clerkship and the second was the last week "the 8th week". The preparation for the exam was not difficult, the key is to study every day and review the lectures in the exam's week. Also, make a use of the old exam files and the students' questions as well. Our grades were very good and some of us got almost a full mark, so this is a great chance for you to save your GPA.

Google drive link:

Resources

In this clerkship, you don't need to buy books and the main resources will be your slides and summaries. An additional resource you might need to the AAFP website to check a few things to be up-to-date with the latest changes in managing different diseases. Pay attention to the doctors during lectures to have an idea about what is coming in the exam and to cut down your studying time. Moreover, make sure to master the HTN, DM and Dyslipidemia topics from A to Z because those are the most encounter chronic diseases in the primary health care and a huge percentage of the exam questions from these topics.

Dress code and attendance

Dr. Malak gave us paper and made sure to tell us about what to wear and not to wear as females. She said that they will cut down marks for the inappropriate dress code, being late and absences. Dress code note:

OSCE

The OSCE was so easy and up to the point, you can get very good grades by applying your skills from the previous years and adding the new things that you learned during the clerkship. They provided us with a blueprint that includes headlines of the possible topics and the doctor was very kind to reduce the list. One of the things that will save your grades is to ask about "ICE and impact", do the "systematic review" and "rule out red flags". There are very good checklists and summaries that will aid you to prepare for the OSCE and you can find these lists in the google-drive, so made sure to check them. Here is the link to the blueprint: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1vITjmgDGobU79Z9Fa8YX4IAa5UVaiY-d

Thank you for reading this post If you find it helpful, please share it Have a good day


 
 
 

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