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Identifying and Remediating Quality Issues at Clinical Teaching Sites: A CERA Clerkship Directors Survey

Background and Objectives: Family medicine clerkship directors must secure an adequate number of teaching sites while maintaining or improving the quality of teaching. This survey details how family medicine clerkship directors identify community-based clinical sites with performance challenges, types of challenges, and whether a remediation option exists for struggling clinical sites or preceptors. This study also investigates the relationship between clerkship structure and problems with maintaining high-quality teaching sites.
Methods: Data were gathered and analyzed as part of the 2018 Council of Academic Family Medicine’s (CAFM) Educational Research Alliance (CERA) survey of family medicine clerkship directors.
Results: There was a significant relationship between ease/difficulty of identifying clinical sites and paying preceptors (P=.032). A lower proportion of sites where a system is in place for remediation reported it being difficult to identify clinical sites (70.0% vs 92.2%, respectively, P=.011). Having a remediation system in place was also associated with less removal of sites (2.5% removed three or more sites vs 25% removed three or more sites, respectively, P=.005).
Conclusions: Medical education leaders can explore payment to incentivize community-based preceptors in schools where identifying clinical sites is a challenge. Offering centralized preceptor development activities from medical schools, geared toward the importance of evaluations, balancing learners and opportunities for student engagement, may overcome some of the identified challenges. Medical schools may also consider providing additional time and support for clerkship directors to assist with tracking teaching quality at sites, and to assist struggling preceptors prior to removing them from teaching.