Phase 2

This 2-week required course prepares learners to move from Phase 1 to Phase 2 of the curriculum. The course occurs at both the Charlottesville and Inova campuses. Students have the opportunity to practice skills and demonstrate knowledge necessary for the first day of clerkships.

This 6-week clerkship provides exposure to a spectrum of common acute and chronic medical conditions encountered in the inpatient Internal Medicine setting. Learners work closely with patients, practicing skills ranging from history taking and physical diagnosis to ordering diagnostic studies and developing treatment plans. Students practice evidence-based medicine and coordination of care across disciplines with a wide range of health professionals.

This 6-week rotation increases understanding of outpatient medicine through engaging clinical experiences and high-value teaching workshops. Students take an active role in caring for patients across a range of practices – including Family Medicine, Ambulatory Internal Medicine, and Geriatrics – and learn to identify the shared goals and differentiators among these disciplines. A consistent set of clinical ambulatory practice preceptors guide learners through the entire program as they practice skills such as history taking, physical exams, oral presentations, and written documentation. The geriatric clinical experience is woven throughout the clerkship.

During this 12-week rotation, students rotate through ambulatory, inpatient and operating room settings of the surgical, women’s health, and anesthesiology services. This includes time on the labor and delivery unit learning about childbirth and management of women’s health issues. High fidelity simulation opportunities reinforce concepts learned in the clinic, providing additional hands-on training.

The Pediatrics clerkship is a 6-week experience designed to introduce students to the fundamentals of caring for children from birth and infancy to adolescence and into young adulthood. The clerkship is divided into a three-week inpatient experience and a three-week ambulatory experience. Learners have the opportunity to participate in both general pediatric and specialty care.

During this 3-week rotation, students will learn the fundamentals of assessing, diagnosing, and treating major psychiatric illness as well as common medical and nervous system disorders related to psychiatry practice. Learners explore the interplay of biological, psychological, and social factors in patients’ lives in a variety of settings, including the acute inpatient psychiatric unit, the psychiatric consultative service, and outpatient clinics.

This 3-week rotation provides a clinical context for concepts learned in the Mind, Brain, and Behavior course during Phase 1. Learners will be assigned an inpatient core experience within general adult neurology, vascular neurology, adult neurology consults, or pediatric neurology, with additional experiences in general outpatient neurology and specialty clinics.

In this course, students enhance clinical learning through activities designed to revisit basic science, incorporate curricular threads, and practice clinical skills such as physical exam, diagnostic reasoning, quality improvement, communication, and other clerkship-specific procedures and skills.

Foundations of Clinical Medicine (FCM) continues during clerkship as FCM-2. This course comprises a mix of one-on-one meetings with the student’s physician coach to reflect on performance, assess strengths and weakness, and co-create learning plans for continued development of clinical skills. Students meet at regular intervals with their small group to reflect on patient care experiences and learn from each other. This course intentionally mirrors the metacognitive and strategic thinking components of self-regulated learning so that students can practice and apply skills learned in clerkships and be motivated to incorporate these behaviors to achieve continuous, lifelong improvement as physicians.