Introduction MD-PhD students experience a prolonged hiatus away from clinical medicine during their laboratory research phase and some have experienced difficulty transitioning back to clinical medicine during clerkship years. years of experience we have made modifications that result in our students scoring comparably well on a standardized patient exam to their second-year medical student colleagues. By the end of the course all students reported feeling more comfortable completing a history and physical examination and some improvement in preclinical knowledge base. Review of clerkship scores showed a higher percentage of MD-PhD students scoring Honors in a clerkship in years after course implementation as compared to years prior to Rabbit polyclonal to DDX3X. course implementation. Conclusion We describe a clinical refresher course for successfully retraining MD-PhD students to re-enter clinical medical training. It is effective at restoring clinical skills to a level comparable to their medical student contemporaries and prepares them to rejoin the medical student class at the conclusion of their research phase. Introduction Physician scientist training programs support students in obtaining a dual degree of an MD and a PhD in order to encourage individuals to pursue WS3 WS3 careers doing medical translational research. Students in these programs usually finish two years of pre-clinical classes alongside graduate coursework and then move to the research phase which may take three to five years to complete (Dyrbye et al. 2004; Brass et al. 2010). Students then re-enter the WS3 medical school to start their clinical training. Since WS3 there is a long hiatus between the pre-clinical and clinical years of training these dual-degree students are often at a disadvantage upon entering their clinical clerkships as compared with their single degree medical student counterparts. They report feeling uncomfortable with their clinical skills and knowledge base since their pre-clinical training was several years in the past (Chandavarkar et al. 2007; O’Brien et al. 2007; Roberts et al. 2012; Raat et al. 2013). During the PhD research years some students may have limited clinical exposure such as participation in a student-run clinic or through shadowing experiences (Chumley et al. 2005; Goldberg & Insel 2013); however major lapses in clinical exposure often persist. Clinical refresher or re-immersion programs exist in dual-degree programs in various forms at different institutions (van Gessel et al. 2003; Poncelet & O’Brien 2008; Roberts et al. 2012; Goldberg & Insel 2013). They vary in factors including duration of course whether the course is required the level of required participation of students and the amount of clinical exposure and didactic experiences. Programs range in duration and some strongly encourage students to take a course to refresh their clinical skills prior to re-entering the clerkship years but do not require it (Chumley et al. 2005; Chandavarkar et al. 2007; Brass et al. 2010; Bills et al. 2013). At University of Pennsylvania students participate in an observational course in which students are assigned to inpatient teams and learn through observation. At the University of South Florida students WS3 spend the full year prior to third year spending a half-day clinic/week in an observational role. At Dartmouth University students are set up with individualized clinical WS3 exposures in a shadowing role. At Harvard Medical School a Longitudinal Course in Clinical Medicine runs for eight weeks and is recommended (but not required) for all returning MD-PhD students (Bills et al. 2013). The course consists of weekly two-hour sessions to re-introduce history and physical exam skills and subsequent sessions include interactive case discussions presenting common clinical problems. One morning per week students participate in rounds with an inpatient team and then are assigned to a patient whom they follow and then present to an inpatient preceptor. We have developed a formal clinical refresher training course to help dual-degree students more smoothly transition into clinical years by refreshing their skills in history taking physical examination oral and written presentation and clinical reasoning. How to start/How we started/ What we did Program development We started our clinical refresher program in 2007 with a group of seven students who were starting their clinical clerkships after three to five years of PhD training. The course was developed around a multi-disciplinary.