Medicine Core Clerkship

School of Medicine

Second-year medical students participate in an eight-week, inpatient/outpatient clinical clerkship within the Department of Medicine, utilizing the clinical services of the Vanderbilt and VA hospitals. It is believed that learning is most vivid through direct experience with patients, obtaining histories, and doing physicals and laboratory studies, and that it is amplified by reading and intensive contact with members of the teaching staff and house staff. Students are given considerable responsibility under close supervision of the teaching staff. Five weeks of the clerkship is devoted to inpatient experience. This is further divided into three rotations: 2 weeks, 2 weeks, and 1 week of general medicine or subspecialty. Each student is assigned to a faculty/resident team and functions as an apprentice physician with graded responsibility for the evaluation and management of patients admitted to the medicine service. Students participate in clinical and teaching activities of the service, including daily attending rounds, morning report, noon conferences, Grand Rounds. Students receive student directed curricular content in the form of weekly core lectures, weekly "chalk talks" and clinical case conferences. In addition, students meet on a regular basis with an assigned Master Clinical Teacher to undergo supervised histories, physicals, and presentation with directed feedback and coaching. The Medicine Core Clerkship is one of the 6 required core clerkships that comprise the Foundations of Clinical Care (FCC) Phase during the second year of VUSM’s MD curriculum.