A clinical refresher course for medical scientist trainees

Abstract

Introduction: MD–PhD students experience a prolonged hiatus away from clinical medicine during their laboratory research phase and some have experienced difficulty transitioning back to clinical medicine during clerkship years. We developed a clinical refresher program that serves to rebuild clinical skills prior to re-entering the clinical clerkship years.

Methods: A nine-week program includes a combination of didactic and practical review in history, physical exam, presentation and clinical reasoning skills. The program uses multiple modalities from classroom-based activities to patient care encounters and includes a final assessment using standardized patients.

Results: After seven years of experience, we have made modifications that result in our students scoring comparably well on a standardized patient exam to their second-year medical student colleagues. By the end of the course, all students reported feeling more comfortable completing a history and physical examination and some improvement in preclinical knowledge base. Review of clerkship scores showed a higher percentage of MD–PhD students scoring Honors in a clerkship in years after course implementation as compared to years prior to course implementation.

Conclusion: We describe a clinical refresher course for successfully retraining MD–PhD students to re-enter clinical medical training. It is effective at restoring clinical skills to a level comparable to their medical student contemporaries and prepares them to rejoin the medical student class at the conclusion of their research phase.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the following individuals who made the program development possible: Dr David Thomas, Dr Lisa Satlin, and Dr Goutham Narla for their contributions to starting this course, to Dr Eric Smith for compiling the early outcome data on the course, and to the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the Graduate School of Biological Sciences for their support of this program. Special thanks to Dr Yasmin Hurd, the Medical Scientist Training Program Director at Mount Sinai, for her support of and dedication to this program and for helpful feedback during the writing of this manuscript.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no declarations of interest.