STFM UNVEILS THE NATIONAL FAMILY MEDICINE CLERKSHIP CURRICULUM WEBSITE

STFM recently unveiled The National Family Medicine Clerkship Curriculum website. It outlines best practices for delivering and evaluating the core curriculum for 3rd-year family medicine clerkships and offers educational methods, assessment strategies, and resources for clerkship directors and medical school faculty. It also lets users see how colleagues are teaching and assessing specific competencies. The website can be accessed by STFM members at http://www.stfm.org/cci.

“This resource is really an enhancement to the Family Medicine Clerkship Curriculum. It takes the “what” of the curriculum into mind and delivers users with the “how” of implementing the curriculum in their own departments,” said Katie Margo, MD, University of Pennsylvania.

This website is actually the 2nd phase of the curriculum project. It gives clerkship directors and other medical school faculty the tools to implement the National Family Medicine Curriculum. The curriculum defined the core content of a family medicine clerkship and established the goals and objectives; defined principles; listed core conditions for acute presentations, chronic illnesses, and prevention visits; and addressed the role of family medicine. The National Family Medicine Clerkship Curriculum was created for several purposes. A national standard for the clerkship curriculum helps curriculum committees gain a better understanding of the time needed to accomplish the clerkship goals and objectives. Defining the content gives a framework for development of educational resources, such as fmCASES, which can be shared across institutions. Standardized core content helps our representatives who are working with the NBME on the subject examination in family medicine.

The National Family Medicine Clerkship Curriculum was designed for clerkship directors and faculty members engaged in 3rd-year medical student education. The content is organized into 4 sections: curriculum competencies and content, clerkship director roles and resources, educational methods, and assessment strategies. The curriculum competencies and content is the work of the first task force, organized to be web friendly. The clerkship director roles and resources outlines the different roles expected of a clerkship director, highlights best bet resources for clerkship directors, and provides some information on fellowships. The educational methods section contains information on 8 common methods: experiential learning, small-group sessions, simulation/standardized patients, skill development sessions, case-based learning, self-study, reflection, and products/projects. For each educational methods topic, there is background information, key questions with short evidence-based responses, best practices, and references. Assessment strategies provide a wealth of information organized into student assessment and evaluation, program evaluation and improvement, faculty development for educational evaluation, and developing an educational research program.

The National Family Medicine Clerkship Curriculum website partnered with the STFM Resource Library (http://www.fmdrl.org) to provide peer reviewed curricular pieces that match objectives of the national curriculum. These can be accessed through the clerkship curriculum website. The family medicine Clerkship Curriculum Implementation (CCI) task force solicited curricular pieces that matched objectives in the principles of family medicine section. “Real-world examples of curricula can provide visionary yet practical ways to improve a clerkship,” said Alexander Chess-man, MD, Medical University of South Carolina.

The CCI task force focused on the principles section because these objectives are often the most difficult to address and the content addressing these objectives changes less frequently than content addressing many clinical topics. Family medicine educators submitted materials that included all items needed to replicate the curricular experience in another institution. After peer review, 6 submissions were chosen and are currently present on the website. At the time of this writing, these submissions have between 15 and 163 hits each. In the future, additional calls for submissions will occur. This section will develop over time to provide clerkship directors and faculty members with peer reviewed resources that are directly tied to specific objectives of the national family medicine clerkship.

The STFM Education Committee has the responsibility for the maintenance and upkeep of the website. This initiative will undergo assessment to ensure that it currently meets and continues to meet the needs of the family medicine clerkship directors and medical student education faculty. The assessment will initially include measurements of website use and national curriculum implementation. The first data review, completed 3 weeks after launch, revealed high use: the website had 2,638 hits with 1,901 unique page views. The Education Committee also holds the responsibility for envisioning and creating version 2.0.

In the future, the website may provide more online interaction, networking, or mentoring; serve as a hub for identifying colleagues to collaborate on multi-institutional educational research; or even provide opportunities for CME credit, particularly around assessment.

This initiative, developed by STFM, was also supported by the STFM Foundation.

This curriculum has also been endorsed by the AAFP and the other Council of Academic Family Medicine organizations: ADFM, AFMRD, and NAPCRG.

• © 2012 Annals of Family Medicine, Inc.