 Bruce Fleming |
 Mark MacKenzie |
In the May 2013 issue of the British Columbia Medical Journal (BCMJ), two educational leaders in the UBC Faculty of Medicine — Bruce Fleming, Associate Dean of Admissions, and Mark MacKenzie, Director of the Integrated Community Clerkship (ICC) program — describe the Faculty’s experiment with an alternative approach to clinical training, pioneered in Chilliwack and subsequently rolled out to five other B.C. communities.
The complete article is online at the BCMJ website. Here is the abstract:
“An innovative form of clinical training has been a successful and popular component of the MD undergraduate program in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of British Columbia since 2004. The Integrated Community Clerkship Program is an example of a longitudinal integrated clerkship that integrates student clinical experience and ensures continuity of student contact with patients. The program offers year 3 medical students an alternative to traditional teaching hospital rotations. The current annual cohort of 20 students is selected from a pool of applicants. Launched in Chilliwack, BC, a largely rural community of 80000, the Integrated Community Clerkship Program is now operating in six different communities in the province. Students learn from the opportunities afforded by long-term relationships with patients, preceptors, and health care team members. Since the launch of the program, students have been found to perform academically as well as their traditionally trained counterparts, and to demonstrate strong procedural and problem-solving skills. Although to date most integrated clerkship graduates have tended to choose family medicine, any program choice is open to them, as residency match results for 2006 to 2012 indicate.”