AAMC Project on the Clinical Education of Medical
Students
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Recommendations for Clinical Skills Curricula for Undergraduate Medical Education
This consensus document contains six specific recommendations for developing an explicit clinical skills curriculum for medical students. These include guiding principles, specific clinical skills objectives, a menu of specific skills for consideration, a set of categories for organizing clinical skill learning opportunities, an explicit developmental approach to clinical skills curricular design, and a set of curricular program elements.
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Skillful physician performance is fundamental to the delivery of quality medical care. Thus, medical education must ensure that all students develop and continually refine basic clinical skills throughout their careers.
"The student no longer merely watches, listens, memorizes: he does. His own activities in the laboratory and in the clinic are the main factors in his instruction and discipline. An education in medicine nowadays involves both learning and learning how; the student cannot effectively know, unless he knows how." - Abraham Flexner, 1910
Task Force on the Clinical Skills Education of Medical Students
The AAMC's Project on the Clinical Education of Medical
Students was designed to conduct a
comprehensive review of the clinical education of
medical students and to effect changes in the
design and conduct of the clinical curriculum to
improve the quality of medical students' education. As part of this Project, the AAMC convened the Task Force on the Clinical Skills Education of Medical Students in June 2003. The Task Force included representatives from the seven national clerkship organizations, the Alliance for Clinical Education, and the American Academy on Physician and Patient.
The Task Force produced Recommendations for Clinical Skills Curricula for Undergraduate Medical Education to facilitate a more explicit approach to developing medical students' clinical method performance ability, and to inspire educators in their commitment to this essential element of physician competency.
Earlier Reports
Clinical Skills Education (PDF, 13 pages)
An exploratory examination of the state of clinical skills education in US medical schools, resulting in a snapshot view of what is in place at the aggregate institutional level, 2002-2003
Report on Millennium Conferences I and II (PDF, 16 pages)
The AAMC convened two national conferences, in 2001 and 2002, on the
clinical education of medical students in the new
millennium. The conferences
involved small teams of medical educators and
education leaders from a representative group of
medical schools. The objective was to generate ideas for innovations
in clinical education that schools
could use in designing educational reforms at their institutions, and that
could be disseminated widely to stimulate reform
at other institutions.
The AAMC Project on the Clinical Education of Medical Students (PDF, 17 pages)
The AAMC conducted a study during the 2000-2001 academic year to gain insight into the clinical education of medical students. The study design included review of a number of relevant reports and documents, extraction of relevant data from several AAMC databases, and structured site visits to more than 20 medical schools. The results of the study showed a number of deficiencies in students' clinical education.
To request hard copies of reports, contact Alexis Ruffin at 202-828-0439 or alruffin@aamc.org.
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