Exploring the Utility of Longitudinal Clinical Electives in Training Dual-Degree Students

Longitudinal clinical encounters have proven to be effective alternatives to traditional single-specialty block rotations in medical education. These experiences enhance learning by allowing students to develop longer relationships with patients and mentors and to participate in interdisciplinary care. Though proven useful for students pursuing the MD degree, application and assessment of such longitudinal clinical experiences have not been studied with students seeking a dual degree. At our institution, students working towards both MD and PhD degrees have considerably longer matriculation periods than their single-degree peers. In the years in which they concentrate on research towards the PhD, they traditionally have not taken part in clinical activities, threatening atrophy of clinical knowledge and skills attained to that point. To counter this effect, our institution has developed a longitudinal clinical elective (LCE) in which students can take part simultaneous with their research tasks. We interviewed 16 dual-degree students after participation in the LCE and learned that they garnered similar benefits to those experienced by single-degree students participating in longitudinal clerkships. Additionally, students in our study described ways in which they were able to not only preserve but also enhance their clinical acumen, as well as ways in which simultaneous research and clinical endeavors complemented one another. Our exploratory study suggests that given the long matriculation of dual-degree students, LCEs are effective in mitigating atrophy of clinical skills and are useful in various other ways that we highlight. These findings may benefit other types of dual-degree students (e.g., MD/MBA) as well. © 2017, International Association of Medical Science Educators.