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It takes a community to train a future physician: social support experienced by medical students during a community-engaged longitudinal integrated clerkship

It takes a community to train a future physician: social support experienced by medical students during a community-engaged longitudinal integrated clerkship

  • July 24, 2019
  • Timothy Dube, Robery Schinke and Roger Strasser
  • Article

Social support may be beneficial for medical students who must develop adaptive strategies to respond
to the demands and challenges during third-year clerkship. We provide a detailed description of the supportive
behaviours experienced by third-year students during a longitudinal integrated clerkship (LIC) in the context of rural
family medicine. Informed by a social constructivist research paradigm, we undertook a qualitative study to understand
from the students’ perspectives the presence and characteristics of social support available during a LIC. Data were
collected from conversational interviews at three points during the eight-month clerkship year, pre-, during, and
post-clerkship, to explore how 12 medical students experienced social support. We employed an innovative
methodological approach, the guided walk method, to gain the students’ stories in the contexts where they were
taking place. Various individuals representing communities of practice such as the medical profession and community
members were intimately related to the longitudinal aspects of the students’ experiences. The findings lend
credence to the view that it really does take a community to train a future physician.

  • Source: Canadian Medical Education Journal

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