title: A clinical refresher course for medical scientist trainees.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  MD-PhD students experience a prolonged hiatus away from clinical medicine during their laboratory research phase and some have experienced difficulty transitioning back to clinical medicine during clerkship years. We developed a clinical refresher program that serves to rebuild clinical skills prior to re-entering the clinical clerkship years.
  
  
  METHODS
  A nine-week program includes a combination of didactic and practical review in history, physical exam, presentation and clinical reasoning skills. The program uses multiple modalities from classroom-based activities to patient care encounters and includes a final assessment using standardized patients.
  
  
  RESULTS
  After seven years of experience, we have made modifications that result in our students scoring comparably well on a standardized patient exam to their second-year medical student colleagues. By the end of the course, all students reported feeling more comfortable completing a history and physical examination and some improvement in preclinical knowledge base. Review of clerkship scores showed a higher percentage of MD-PhD students scoring Honors in a clerkship in years after course implementation as compared to years prior to course implementation.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  We describe a clinical refresher course for successfully retraining MD-PhD students to re-enter clinical medical training. It is effective at restoring clinical skills to a level comparable to their medical student contemporaries and prepares them to rejoin the medical student class at the conclusion of their research phase.
authors: Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai , USA.
authors: Talia H
authors: TH
authors: Swartz
authors: Jenny J
authors: JJ
authors: Lin
mesh_terms: D002982:Clinical Clerkship / Q000458:organization & administration*; D002983:Clinical Competence; D003479:Curriculum; D006801:Humans; D010808:Physical Examination; D012108:Research Personnel / Q000193:education*; D013337:Students, Medical