I wanted to post a question I received in a PM from another prospective student, and I hope it's informative to all of you. I asked permission of this person prior to posting.
Hey tantacles,
Thanks for all your responses on the CMS page! I interviewed back in Sept and hoping to get some good news soon. I have a question about patient care experience during M1/2 years. I understand the free clinic is new and that opens some new doors, but from what I understand pt care experience is limited. Actually something I found concerning during my interview came from a M4. He said he went to his first day on rotations and was told to 'go see' the pt and he had no idea what to do. He said he went in said hi and walked out. Maybe it was nerves or was it lack of preparation for clinical years? Can you comment anymore on how much pt care interaction you get during years 1 and 2? Are there physician mentors/preceptors in the community that will let you come out to 'shadow' or do some h&ps?
Thank you!!
Hi, there!
While I will say that clinical experience in the M1 and M2 year is limited and is not currently a strength of our school (though we're stronger now that we students have started the free clinic), I can almost guarantee that the student you spoke to was exaggerating. If I were sent into a patient's room as a medical student as an M2 (I just started M2 year), I could almost certainly take a history and full physical. I don't now that I'd be able to diagnose yet, but I'd certainly be able to run through vital signs, the history of present illness, and the physical exam with a good deal of acuity.
To give you a timeline of clinical experience (excluding the clinic, which I'll tell you about in the next section of this message):
Year 1: Essentials of Clinical Reasoning 1 - This course trains and tests extensively on the physical exam. Among other methods of testing, we perform a videotaped history of present illness with a standardized patient (which includes a writeup of the mock case) and a videotaped physical exam in the EEC, which you probably toured through, or at least saw, when you came to the school. It's that really high tech room in lower floor of the school. In addition, we have lecture and lab sessions all year that focus on myriad clinical skills, including, but not limited to: The pulmonary exam, cardiac exam, GI exam, and the neurology exam.
Year 2 - Essentials of clinical reasoning 2 - This year focuses much more on diagnosis. I've only just started, but already we've covered dermatological diseases and some diseases of immune hypersensitivity. We review the physical exam from the year before but with a focus on interpreting our findings rather than just understanding how to do the exam.
In addition, as a required part of this course, we are assigned a clinical preceptor in our second year, and we are expected to shadow this preceptor and do H&Ps and physicals in his/her clinic.
So while we may not have much clinical experience in the curriculum, to say that we have none is definitely an understatement of the clinical time we do have.
In addition, the Interprofessional Community Clinic was recently open. The clinic is exclusively managed by students but staffed by professionals from every professional school (medicine, psychology, podiatry, pharmacy, and more) that the school has. Students exam patients, present to attendings, and overall get to behave like 3rd and 4th year medical students while the faculty supervises.