What did we learn about the impact on students' clinical education?

Analysis of the impact of the Interdisciplinary Generalist Curriculum (IGC) Project would be incomplete without discussion of how it affected students' clinical education. This article explores the impact of the IGC Project on medical students' clinical education at the ten IGC schools. The schools typically lacked pre-IGC Project baseline data for comparison, although they all collected data on the impact of the new curriculum on the clinical education of students. Measures included some objective indicators and various subjective measures of the perceptions of the students, faculty, and community preceptors. The impact of curricular innovations at the IGC Project schools on students was immediate as they began to see patients early and continuously as part of their medical education. Students, faculty, and community preceptors who interacted with these students during their third year believed they were "different" because of their participation in the IGC. Not only did the IGC students approach patients with better integrated basic science knowledge, but also a different kind of student arrived at the third year, the traditional beginning of clinical experiences in medical education.