You will also have a ward attending who will meet with your team to discuss the patients on your team’s service.

In addition, you will have a teaching attending (separate from the ward attending) with whom you will meet ~3 times a week. You will discuss various topics with your teaching attending and will present some of your patients during these meetings.

You will also meet with your firm chief (another attending) once/week to discuss other topics.

What to Expect

Your resident will assign you to follow a couple of patients (an intern/sub-I will also be following the patient). Your responsibilities will include rounding on the pts in the morning, following up their lab results, and writing a note in their chart each day. You may also be asked to draw blood or call consults for your patients.

Schedule

The day generally begins with pre-rounding from 7:15-7:30. This is when you quickly check up on your patients, check their vital signs from that morning and overnight and find out if there were any significant events that occurred overnight. Afterwards, the entire team will round on the patients as a group, where the daily plans for each patient are usually discussed. You may present your patients to your team during rounds. During the rest of the day, you will work on your notes/draw blood/call consults for your patients. There are often conferences during the day that you will attend. On non-call days, you will hopefully end the day around 5 or 6 PM (sometimes earlier, sometimes later). On long-call days, you may be there until 10 PM.

Teams are on long-call every 4 days. On long-call days, teams admit patients until 6 PM. The day after your long-call day is called your post-call day. Your team will not admit new patients on post-call days. The day after the post-call day is your short-call day. Your team will admit patients until 12 PM (maximum of 6 new patients). The day before your long-call day is your pre-call day. Your team does not admit patients on this day. Pre-call day is generally the “lightest” day of the cycle.

Overall

Medicine is a very busy clerkship, but you will learn a lot about patient management. Generally, you will be in the hospital 6 days out of the week (no “golden” weekends, officially—though some variability may exist). This is the clerkship that probably requires the most “after hours” work.

Evaluation

Based on input from your teaching attendings and firm chief for the most part. Shelf exam at the end of the clerkship factors into grading as well.

How to Succeed

Your medicine grade is largely determined by the evaluations from your teaching attendings and firm chief. Therefore, you will want to impress them when giving presentations or doing patient write-ups.

Suggested Books

Pocket Medicine (to carry on the wards)

First Aid for the Medicine Clerkship