Family Medicine Clerkship

Family and Community Medicine Clerkship

The required Year 3 Family and Community Medicine Clerkship offers a 4-week block immersion experience with community-based preceptors or faculty members from the department’s 5 residency programs. Our goal is to provide an educational experience that emphasizes continuous comprehensive medical care within the context of the Patient-Centered Medical Home. Additionally, the curriculum promotes understanding of the core concepts of Family Medicine through elements of health policy, clinical epidemiology, preventive medicine, community-oriented primary care, health literacy, continuous quality improvement, medical informatics, practice management, health disparities, and biopsychosocial issues. Current and previous components of the curriculum have been presented at international and national education conferences. SIU medical students may also choose from many one to four-week selectives during the Personalized Education Plan (PEP) component of their third year of medical school. This allows the students to further investigate Family Medicine as a specialty and career choice.  Some of these selectives include geriatrics, procedures, prompt care, hospitalist medicine, and rural experience.  Details regarding our curriculum may be found on the clerkship’s D2L page hosted by the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine.

Family Medicine Surgical Skills LabThe FCM Clerkship has utilized community-based preceptors since 1981 and currently has over 160 board-certified family physicians located throughout the state of Illinois. Our preceptors have been instrumental in the FCM Clerkship’s achievement of excellent feedback and high ranking by medical students. Additionally, our students have rated the clerkship most positively with regards to respect, professionalism, and role modeling. Past student remarks have also consistently identified the following clerkship strengths: clerkship organization, faculty contact, patient number and variety, clinical autonomy, functioning as a team member, patient continuity, working in a community-based practice, and the opportunity to learn outside Springfield’s academic center. We believe these remarks to be reflective of the necessity to introduce the breadth and scope of the Patient-Centered Medical Home within a community-based block immersion experience.