Integrating Clinical Presentation with Patient Encounter Experience and Community-Based Activities in the Pre-clerkship Curriculum. An Example of a Framework for Design, Implementation, and Evaluation

The urgent need to enhance medical students’ clinical problem-solving skills even in the pre-clerkship phase ushered in several initiatives in the medical school curriculum. One of such initiative is the introduction of clinical presentation activities combined with patient encounter experience and community-based activities in the first year of medical school. The study described the design, implementation, and evaluation of a medical school curriculum that integrates clinical presentation activities with patient encounter experience and a community-based educational program. For the clinical presentation, a two-tailed, Student’s t-test showed a significant and higher performance in the summative assessments when compared with the formative assessment (P < 0.01). The KR-20 value for the reliability was between 0.69 and 0.92. For the patient interaction experience and community-based stroke education program, medical students demonstrated a significant (P < 0.05) higher perception of their experience in all assessment categories in the post-test evaluation. An integrated curriculum that allows students to directly interact with patients, families, and community members may add a positive context and engagement experience to make a difference in the education of future physicians.