Clinical experience of medical students in North Carolina family medicine preceptorships.

The clinical experience of 29 medical students from 14 medical schools, while they were taking elective preceptorships with 15 North Carolina family physicians, is compared with clinical experience in a university medical center in the same state and in practices from the neighboring state of Virginia. A total of 6,641 problem contacts, averaging 229 per student, were reported over a three-year period. Certain problems were recorded with higher frequency in the preceptorships than in the medical center, for example, acute infections, lacerations, prenatal care, obesity, and hypertension. These findings support the importance of preceptorships in supplementing the clinical experience of university medical centers, and the close similarity of these North Carolina data to those from Virginia suggests the usefulness of this type of information for planning medical school and residency curricula.