Medical Students – 3rd Year Clerkship

Welcome to Family Medicine! Over the next 8 weeks you will engage in a cursory overview of the breadth of Family Medicine as a specialty. The great thing about our specialty is that it combines many of the skills that you learn on your other clerkships, and allows you to practice them on a variety of different patient types from pediatrics through geriatrics. You will quickly find that this variety provides an excellent environment to use all of the education you have been given. We hope that this experience also allows you to look at your practice of medicine through a different perspective.

Family Medicine is a great specialty to allow you to look at each patient as a whole vs. as a organ or a disease. This perspective truly allows Family Medicine to be at the heart of the Patient Centered Medical Home. As Family Physicians, we have the unique ability to care for each individual’s family, to understand their social situation, and to develop a relationship with them over time.

As a patient’s medical home, we provide a place for a patient to be seen for their acute needs, their chronic needs, and their preventive care services. Family Physicians serve as an integral hub to coordinate and integrate care between other specialists.

During your clerkship, you will learn a variety of skills from the care of patients in the clinic, to the inpatient ward, to the nursing home, and basic procedural skills; however, my hope, as Clerkship director, is that you will begin to learn more about the art of medicine. I hope that you begin to understand the value of continuity in patient care, the effect of behaviors on chronic disease, the importance of comprehensive care, and the importance of compassion and empathy as it relates to patient satisfaction and outcomes.

Our goal is for this to be your best clerkship this year and to give you basic clinical skills to allow you to use your gifts in which ever specialty you are to be destined. Our desire is for you to see the joy, opportunity, and variety within Family Medicine and consider joining alongside us in our pursuit of making a difference in someone’s life.