Background:
The number of attending‐only services in traditional teaching hospitals has increased. This trend is largely a result of decreased patient coverage by residents in response to ACGME duty‐hour restrictions, as well as planned growth within institutions. Medical student enrollment has not decreased, leading to medical student participation on attending‐only teams. An attending‐only service can offer some unique benefits for medical students, including increased direct contact with attendings and enhanced opportunities for direct observation and feedback. Challenges to medical student education on attending‐only services may include the attending's competing patient care obligations, rapid turnover of attending assignments, and a more complex case mix. A standardized curriculum for medical students on an attending‐only service can take advantage of these benefits, address the potential challenges, and provide a comprehensive general pediatrics inpatient experience.
Purpose:
To create a curriculum specific to medical students who do their core pediatrics clerkship on an attending‐only hospitalist service.
Description:
A curriculum was developed for students completing the inpatient portion of their pediatric core clerkship on our attend‐ing‐only hospitalist team. Using the general pediatrics clerkship learning objectives as a reference, a list of core pediatric topics and corresponding teaching materials was created. A “teaching checklist” was developed, which includes these core topics, as well as specific educational activities for attendings to carry out with the students. Examples include direct observation of histories, physical examinations, or interactions with patients and families, provision of feedback on written and verbal presentations, and demonstration or role modeling of particular behaviors or skills. The checklist also lists patients of different ages (infant, toddler, preschooler, school‐aged child, and adolescent) to ensure the student is exposed to a variety of developmental stages and pathologies. The students’ daily schedule includes structured rounds in the mornings and dedicated learning time in the afternoons. We added teaching sessions on the 2 afternoons per week when the students did not already have scheduled didactic sessions, and the teaching checklist was used for planning and tracking these sessions. For times when the patient care responsibilities of the service attendings interfered with their ability to teach, a “teaching float” system was developed utilizing the off‐service hospitalist attendings.
Conclusions:
We developed a structured curriculum for third‐year medical students, taking advantage of the unique qualities of an attending‐only service while optimizing the students’ learning experience in a fast‐paced patient‐care environment. The curriculum has been well‐received by students, attendings, and the clerkship director.
Disclosures:
J. Alegria ‐ none; K. Lamphier ‐ none; V. Lee ‐ none; C. Russell ‐ none; J. Maniscalco ‐ none