title: Developing a national collaborative of medical educators who lead clinical skills courses.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  The majority of US medical schools now have pre-clerkship clinical skills (PCCS) courses. Course directors for these often logistically complicated courses may be in different medical specialties and, historically, have had few formal opportunities for communication and collaboration with their counterparts at other institutions. As such, we hypothesized that leaders of PCCS courses would benefit from a national network.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  In this paper, we outline the methodology used to form a national collaborative from grass roots interest. Over three years, a self-identified eleven-person task force with national representation has created an organization for PCCS course directors from US medical schools called Directors Of Clinical Skills courses (DOCS) that meets annually.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Through iterative presentations at regional and national medical education meetings, we have produced an inventory of educational issues for those developing, administering, and evaluating PCCS courses. Further development of this nascent organization is ongoing. Our process is generalizable.
authors.affiliation: Department of Family Medicine, Alpert Medical School of Brown University, Providence, RI, USA. Julie Taylor@brown.edu
authors.forename: Julie Scott
authors.initials: JS
authors.lastname: Taylor
authors.forename: Natasha
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Hunter
authors.forename: Preetha
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Basaviah
authors.forename: Matthew
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Mintz
mesh_terms: D002983:Clinical Competence; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D003479:Curriculum; D003625:Data Collection; D004501:Education, Medical / Q000639:trends; D005180:Faculty, Medical / Q000458:organization & administration*; D006801:Humans; D016730:Program Development / Q000379:methods*; D013337:Students, Medical; D014481:United States