In graduate medical education, a clerkship coordinator plays a vital role in coordinating and managing the clinical training experiences of medical students during their clerkship rotations. Clerkships are a crucial part of medical education, where students rotate through different medical specialties and gain hands-on experience in various clinical settings.
The clerkship coordinator is typically a faculty or staff member at the medical school or teaching hospital responsible for organizing and overseeing the logistics of the clerkship program. Their responsibilities may include:
Scheduling: Coordinating the scheduling of medical students' clerkship rotations across different specialties and healthcare facilities. This involves ensuring that each student has exposure to a diverse range of clinical experiences.
Placement: Assigning medical students to specific clinical sites, hospitals, or healthcare facilities for their clerkship rotations, taking into account their preferences and the availability of training opportunities.
Communication: Acting as a liaison between medical students, faculty preceptors, and clinical staff to facilitate smooth communication and ensure that all parties are aware of the rotation details and expectations.
Orientation: Organizing orientation sessions to familiarize medical students with the expectations, guidelines, and goals of the clerkship rotations. This helps ensure students are adequately prepared for their clinical experiences.
Evaluation and Assessment: Managing the evaluation and assessment process, where faculty preceptors and clinical staff provide feedback and performance evaluations on medical students' clinical skills and knowledge during their rotations.
Compliance and Accreditation: Ensuring that the clerkship program adheres to the standards set by accrediting bodies for medical education. This includes making sure that all required documentation and evaluations are properly completed.
Problem-solving: Addressing any issues or challenges that arise during the clerkship rotations, such as scheduling conflicts, student concerns, or facility-related problems.
Support: Providing support and guidance to medical students throughout their clerkship rotations, serving as a resource for any questions or concerns they may have.
Overall, the clerkship coordinator plays a crucial role in enhancing the quality of medical education by organizing and managing the clerkship program efficiently, allowing medical students to receive comprehensive and well-rounded clinical training experiences.
CLERKSHIP COORDINATOR JOBS DESCRIPTION
The Clinical Clerkship Coordinator is responsible for the oversight and administration of clinical clerkships, for third- and fourth-year medical students, under the direction of the Administrative Director for Clinical Education, including a wide range of related administrative duties.
Responsibilities:
Main Accountability Student Information Dissemination/Questions/Problems.
1.1 Handle general questions from students via phone, fax, email, and walk-in.
1.2. Accept students’ completed request forms for time off, schedule changes, and away Clerkships submitted by e-mail, fax, and dropped off in the department; deliver requests to appropriate Clerkship Coordinator.
1.3. Keeps Associate Dean for Clinical Education apprised of student scheduling (producing reports, sharing student performance outcomes, identifying gaps in student schedules, advising of potential inadequacies in clerkship availability, etc.).
Scheduling of Clinical Clerkships.
2.1. Assign third- and fourth-year students to monthly clinical clerkships.
2.2. Communicate with clinical faculty and students as needed to ensure availability of clerkships.
2.3. Coordinate local and away clerkships between Clinical Coordinators.
2.4 Manage and communicate the hospital badging process effectively to both students and hospital/site coordinators.
Ensures timely and accurate information in department databases.
3.1. Maintains and updates databases [faculty tracking database, T-Res database, student assessment database] (processing updates, making corrections and/or additions to the database, archiving data timely, contributing to quality control activities, adhering to established protocols, etc.).
3.2. Serves as liaison with IT in the development and/or expansion of databases for the department (participating in the development as needed for department functions, defining data fields and queries, designing reports, etc.).
3.3. Develops databases as needed for the department.
Contributes to team effort by performing other duties as needed/assigned
Education:
Experience:
Skills & Abilities:
Student Learning Outcomes
The core clerkship learning outcomes are aligned with the Entrustable Professional Activities (EPA’s) as defined by the AAMC. For more information, see the Core Entrustable Professional Activities for Entering Residency publication (pdf).
The Emergency Medicine Specialty Clerkship exposes the student to a wide variety of acutely ill patients presenting to an urban emergency department. Time on the clerkship is divided between several distinct areas in the emergency department, each offering a different mix of patient types and supervising personnel. Eight and twelve-hour shifts are spent working in the main emergency department seeing patients with acute medical, surgical, gynecologic, neurologic and toxicologic presentations. This portion of the clerkship allows the student to participate in the initial evaluation of patients with unknown diagnoses and exercise skills in physical diagnosis, history taking, performance and interpretation of diagnostic tests, oral presentation, formulation of differential diagnoses and clinical reasoning. Students will have the opportunity to participate in the performance of procedures such as venipuncture, arterial puncture and passage of nasogastric tubes and urinary drainage catheters. Students also will be exposed to critically ill patients in the Shock/Resuscitation Unit of the department. Several 10-hour shifts are spent in the Minor Care area of the department. Minor Care serves patients with focused complaints who generally can be definitively treated in the emergency department, or referred for outpatient treatment following temporizing emergency department management. The Minor Care portion of the clerkship allows the student to participate in a broad variety of procedures including local anesthesia, wound debridement and suturing, splinting, conscious sedation, incision and drainage of abscesses and slit-lamp evaluation of the eye.
Most students love third year, and some students hate it. It’s an adjustment for everyone. Third year marks the beginning of student’s clinical years. While the first two years take place mostly in the classroom, the latter two years are primarily in the hospital or clinic. This is what they came to medical school for: to become a doctor and take care of patients.
Clinical rotations are particularly challenging because for the first time in a student’s life, they’re not just studying out of books and taking tests but now most of their hours are spent in the hospital or clinic, and the evaluations from seniors hold tremendous weight in your overall grade.
Every medical student has to take a series of core rotations before graduating. During their third year, they’ll likely be rotating on internal medicine, family medicine, general surgery, psychiatry, neurology, pediatrics, OB/GYN, and emergency medicine.
For clinical rotations, you can expect:
At the end of third year, they’ll be preparing for Step 2CK. Step 2 is similar to Step 1, except now it’s testing the culmination of knowledge from third year of medical school. The most heavily tested concepts are from their internal medicine rotation.
Historically, they won’t be studying nearly as hard as they did for Step 1 as they’ve already learned the foundation necessary to understand medicine. However, note that since Step 1 has shifted to pass/fail, there will be more pressure to do well on Step 2CK. One month of studying for Step 2 will usually suffice.
Third Year (M3)
Students must complete a total of 32 weeks of credit during their fourth year. Specifically, all students must take a defined number of weeks within each elective grouping:
A total of 4 weeks of Internal Medicine Acting Internship
A total of 4 weeks of a Specialty Acting Internship
A total of 12 weeks of Intensive Clinical Experience
A total of 12 weeks of General Electives
An additional 16 weeks is considered unscheduled or flex time, which is time to be used for interviews, vacations, or other personal use.
Sub-I rotation is a four-week experience for the student to practice being an intern under the careful supervision of an attending physician and senior level resident physician. Acting Interns (AI) are the primary caregiver for these patients, performing the history and physical, creating a differential, then writing the orders, and managing the patient’s care. The AI also participates in potential call, potential cross coverage, and patient care transitions just like any other first year resident. Students are required to take an acting internship in Internal Medicine as well as taking a second acting internship from a specialty/discipline of their choice: surgery, pediatrics, family medicine, anesthesiology, obstetrics, gynecology, neurology, psychiatry, emergency medicine or internal medicine.
Working one-on-one with faculty and senior residents, students will care for patients across the whole spectrum of acuity in the ED and simulation center and perform a variety of procedures. Students learn how to approach the undifferentiated patient and build patient management skills by functioning as interns, formulating their own plans, placing orders, and documenting on all patient encounters.
Fourth Year (MS4 or M4)
The first half of fourth year is arguably the hardest part of the entire medical training process, at least if they go into a competitive surgical subspecialty.
Their core clerkships are complete and most of your rotations around this time are electives, which usually means they are no longer graded and are most likely pass/fail, though this varies by school. They no longer carry as much weight as they once did, but that’s not to say M4 will be easy.
The first half of their fourth year is challenging for two main reasons: sub-internships and preparing their residency application.
Sub-internships, also known as audition rotations, are rotations they perform at other institutions anywhere in the country. Students are essentially performing a month-long interview, and they have to be on their best behavior. Their sub-internship is an opportunity to show a program that they should take them into their residency. To accomplish this, they must show up early, stay late, and work hard to make the life of the residents easier. If there’re going into a specialty with a suboptimal lifestyle, like surgery, expect long hours and high stress.
Medical students apply to residency using ERAS, which stands for the Electronic Residency Application Service. The application usually opens around September 15th. It’s a single common application, just like AMCAS, and they submit a personal statement, letters of recommendation, and a work and activities section.
Read Applying to Residencies with ERAS and Apply Smart for Residency
The timing of ERAS Timelines for Residency Applicants vary by specialty, occurring anywhere between October to February. At the end of February, they submit their rank list. Students don’t get accepted by programs in the traditional sense. Instead, both applicants and programs submit a rank list via the NRMP. Around the middle of March, is Match Day.
After March, it’s smooth sailing. Residency starts on July 1st.
Fourth Year (M4)