Strategies for integrating clinical preventive medicine into family medicine clerkships.

Abstract

The value of integrating preventive medicine into primary care is widely accepted, although practical teaching methods to model this integration into medical student clerkships are not well developed. This paper reports on a competency-based clinical preventive medicine curriculum developed within an existing family medicine clinical clerkship. Evaluation of the curriculum during its first full year of implementation shows that students can significantly improve their perceived levels of competence in discussing specific healthy behaviors and risk factors as well as their fund of knowledge in preventive medicine content areas. However, the greatest effect of the curriculum was on increasing students' knowledge of basic health promotion concepts. Results from this clerkship suggest that collaborative efforts to integrate clinical preventive medicine into primary care education and to support the teaching of health promotion and disease prevention in clinical clerkships can be successful.