Message from the Director of Medical Student Education

The Department of Family Medicine is committed to quality and innovative medical student education, and is actively involved in teaching students in all four years of UIC’s undergraduate medical education program. Here’s a brief glimpse at our ongoing endeavors, and our commitments and accomplishments related to medical student education.

Since the establishment of the family medicine clerkship as a required core clerkship in 1991, it has been our goal to ensure that we maintain a state-of-the-art program, one that not only reflects current thinking in medical education but also strives continually to influence innovative, better reasoned and more effective education in our field. We have been guided from the outset by the widely-cited 1984 AAMC GPEP report, adult learning literature, and the best thinking of experts in our own field, including the Future of Family Medicine report. Consistently, we have emphasized small group, active learning that stresses problem solving, self-directed learning and patient-centered care.

Our clerkship has been recognized both locally and nationally for innovations in medical student education We have won three competitive College of Medicine cash awards for excellence in clerkship education (1996, 2002, 2005), the only clerkship to receive more than one such award. We also have been awarded four Department of Health and Human Services HRSA predoctoral education grants, as well as a faculty development grant that focused on helping faculty develop educational innovations for the clerkship. Several of our clerkship innovations have been transported to and are now an integral part of the M1 and M2 curricula at UIC, including workshops on Sexual Health and Substance Use History Taking, which uses real patients with real problems who are trained through our Patients as Teachers program, and workshops using standardized patients to teach Musculoskeletal Diseases. Our faculty regularly present at national meetings.

Besides the clerkship, family medicine faculty are integral to the education of M1 and M2 students. Our faculty provide the leadership for the Essentials of Clinical Medicine (ECM) 1-2 and 3-4 course, which includes the Introduction to Patient Care component and the Patient-centered Medicine Scholars Program (PCM). Our M2 Service Learning Program is a unique community- immersion experience that involves students in the direct care of underserved vulnerable patients in four concentration areas: HIV/AIDS, homeless persons, domestic violence, and immigrant/refugee health.

Family medicine faculty serve as clinical preceptors for students in the M1 through M3 years, as official student advisors for all levels of students, and as mentors for the Family Medicine Interest Group.

Fourth year students are encouraged to self-design local and international experiences. Students have participated in electives in Tanzania, India, Ghana, Australia, Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico, China and other countries. Closer to home, students have worked in rural Illinois or on Native American reservations. This year, we have introduced a peer-teaching opportunity in the Service Learning Program.

For more information on Pre-doctoral Education in the Department of Family Medicine, please contact the Director of Predoctoral Education:

Nipa Shah, MD
Director of Pre-doctoral Education