Gary Ferenchick, MD
Director, Basic Medicine Clerkship

Students on the eight-week Basic Medicine Clerkship are assigned to both inpatient and outpatient sites. The inpatient setting facilitates the development and refinement of comprehensive data gathering skills while the ambulatory sites give students a chance to experience general internal medicine in the venue where internists spend most of their time caring for ambulatory patients. Furthermore, the ambulatory setting teaches students to gather information pertinent to the patient’s ambulatory visit while exposing them to types of patients, problems, and relationships experienced in an outpatient practice. In the ambulatory site, each student works one-on-one with a clinical preceptor.

The goal of the clerkship is the development and refinement of the basic skills needed to treat adult patients with common, chronic, and acute problems.

More specifically, the clerkship focuses on the acquisition and refinement of the skills necessary to perform and record both a comprehensive (not focused) history and physical examination, present patients to colleagues, conduct a geriatric functional assessment, and interpret EKGs and chest x-rays. Furthermore, students practice and advance their clinical reasoning, evaluation and management, and finally, their doctor-patient relationship skills.

Each community campus has a large cadre of faculty in general internal medicine and subspecialties. Most importantly, because our students are trained in community settings, the patients seen are representative of those in clinical practice.