Medical Student Education

Third Year Clerkships - Family Medicine

Third year medical students who rotate with us in Knoxville are integrated into a teaching team of 24 resident physicians and over 30 community and academic faculty in the Department of Family Medicine ​for a 6 week rotation. Students care for patients either in a community-based family physician office or in the University Family Physicians clinic.  Students are given appropriate autonomy for their level of training and are expected to evaluate and present a plan of care for Family Medicine patients in the inpatient and outpatient settings all while learning about the breadth and scope of full-spectrum Family Medicine.

Four weeks of the rotation are spent in the outpatient setting, and the remaining two weeks are spent learning inpatient Family Medicine at the University of Tennessee Medical Center. Weekly faculty-led didactics are tailored to the course objectives and the NBME shelf examination. We continually strive to improve these â€‹lectures based on student feedback.  Other learning opportunities include procedural training â€‹(vasectomies, skin biopsies, and more!) and the opportunity to participate in Sports Medicine coverage alongside our sports medicine fellows.

Since family physicians address the diverse health needs of both individuals and families, the learning experience with clinical preceptors provides the optimal opportunity to consolidate and integrate information from the biological, clinical, and behavioral sciences learned in the M1 and M2 years. The majority of students' time will be spent exploring the professional life of their family physician preceptor, primarily through supervised patient care. This clerkship has a maximum number of six students.