An ambulatory neurology clerkship for third-year medical students. A 20-year perspective.

Abstract

Prompted by a variety of social, technologic, and economic pressures, the ambulatory teaching of medicine is having a renaissance. The required neurology clerkship at the West Virginia University School of Medicine, Morgantown, has been taught to medical students for more than 20 years in an ambulatory setting. This was initially begun out of necessity when we had no neurology residency training program. Our inpatient service was staffed by a single attending neurologist and two inexperienced medicine house staff members, usually at the postgraduate 1 and 2 levels of training. Placing the students in the ambulatory arena allowed for an equitable division of the teaching responsibility among all the attending neurologists, each of whom spent one day each week in the clinic. It soon became apparent that this was an effective teaching mode although, then, it was not in the mainstream of the inpatient-oriented philosophy of teaching medical students. We have