The Internal Medicine (IM) Clerkship is an 8-week clinical rotation offered across the Birmingham, Huntsville, Tuscaloosa, and Montgomery campuses. Overall strengths include strong clinical exposure with diverse patient populations, meaningful inpatient experiences, and positive faculty and resident teaching evaluations. Progress has been made in direct observation of students performing history and physical examinations over recent years. Other improvements include robust use of formative and summative assessments, such as formative feedback tools and MedHub evaluations, to enhance student development.
Opportunities for improvement include strengthening the linkage of clerkship and School of Medicine objectives to better reflect the breadth of clinical exposure. Efforts to improve four-campus communication, collaboration, and sharing of educational resources will be enhanced by a recent process change to discuss clerkship MEC reviews and improvement plans at the monthly four-campus clerkship meetings. It is anticipated that this effort will enhance faculty development and educator training across campuses and disciplines. The review also suggested that the clerkships continue monitoring and addressing learning environment concerns and monitoring Internal Medicine NBME shelf and Step 2 performance.
The Internal Medicine Clerkship remains a strong and comparable educational experience across all campuses. Huntsville showed strengths this cycle in learning environment and teaching evaluations, and Birmingham displayed strong curricular innovation and student engagement. Tuscaloosa and Montgomery continue to offer meaningful clinical experiences, and the committee has identified specific opportunities to strengthen feedback, learning environment, and shelf-exam preparation at these sites. Across all campuses, the committee will prioritize faculty development, ongoing learning environment monitoring, enhanced shelf-exam preparation, and greater cross-campus collaboration.