Longitudinal Continuity Experiences Can Repair Disconnects in the Core Clerkships for Medical Students

The authors describe fundamental changes that have occurred in academic health centers since the 1990s that have caused an increasingly fragmented experience during core clerkships where medical students risk disconnection from faculty mentors, residents, and patients. Longitudinal continuity clinical experiences may constitute a strategy for restoring some of the historic learning conditions. In this issue, Myhre and colleagues and Woloschuk and colleagues compare the performance of students who completed a longitudinal integrated clerkship with the performance of their peers who had completed a traditional rotation-based clerkship year and find that the results are comparable in medical school and after the first year of family medicine residency training. In addition, the authors of this commentary offer observations from their own experience with adding continuity options to traditional core clinical clerkships, with the goal of helping readers understand the range of opportunities and challenges that such initiatives entail.