Familiar Faces

Unlike most elective students, I'm doing a good number of my electives at my home school.

Part of this was by design - as a student applying primarily to Family Medicine, I don't need to do nearly as many electives in one field, so I've got some extra elective time to spend on learning opportunities, on rotations I haven't experienced yet first-hand. Those can be done anywhere, so might as well do them in a familiar setting where I don't have to pay for travel or accommodations. Plus, I can spend more time with my partner and dog at home!

Part of this was definitely not by design - I had some electives at other schools fall through last-minute after months of waiting. Just a reminder that despite the new electives portal in Canada that is supposed make electives more accessible and to eliminate the need for elective-hoarding, there's still a major incentive to gather up as many electives as possible, dropping any excess ones as you go.

One unexpected advantage of this arrangement, however, is getting to see some patients I saw previously on my third year rotations. Seeing a familiar name, or stumbling across a prior dictation with your own name on it is pretty exciting! (Side note - dictation services do a pretty good job. Recently read a note I dictating very early in clerkship and superficially, it looks amazing! When I actually read the content, it's fairly disorganized and rambling. It does its job, but I feel I can do so much better at this stage and it only looks half-decent because the dictating service my hospital uses made it look that good).

This is not necessarily a common experience in medical school. We get shifted from service to service regularly enough that any continuity within these services is pretty short-term. Seeing a patient after 2 months isn't quite the same as checking in on them over a year later, but this longitudinal care is a core part of being a physician. Even as just a reminder of the growth we go through as medical students, I'm appreciating the experience. I know some schools, particularly satellite campuses, have been working with clerkship models that build these sorts of longitudinal experiences into their structure, and US schools having been piloting studies on longitudinal clerkship for years. From speaking to some people in longitudinal medical education programs, I've been given the sense that these set-ups are better in theory than in action, but there is some interesting research on the subject. Given my recent experiences, I would love to see effective longitudinal care fit more cleanly and reliably into undergraduate medical education.