Introduction

Welcome to the third-year Pediatric Clerkship, where “The care of children is the finest privilege!”

We hope that your eight-week experience in Pediatrics will provide you with a broad and exciting introduction to the care of infants, children and adolescents. We, as pediatricians, feel that this is an important patient population to serve because they tend to lack a voice. In general, this population lacks financial and political resources to represent themselves. Our mission in the Department of Pediatrics, at the UND School of Medicine and Health Sciences, is to serve the people of our area by providing teaching, research and service in all aspects of pediatric care. We also understand that while many of you may choose medical specialties besides pediatrics, the majority of you will still provide care to the pediatric population (emergency medicine, surgical specialties, Ob-Gyn, anesthesia, psychiatry, pathology . . .) While rotating through Pediatrics, you will have the opportunity to work as part of a team composed of community attending physicians, nurses and paramedical personnel.

Our commitment to you: The faculty of the Southwest Campus is composed of volunteer faculty pediatricians under the leadership of Dr. Connell, Pediatric Clerkship director. The extent of involvement in patient care will be dependent largely upon you, the student, and your desire, availability and motivation to learn. In order to accomplish the goals of our curriculum, we will provide for you a great combination of patient exposure via ambulatory well-child care visits, acute outpatient sick encounters, a newborn nursery experience, and an inpatient experience consisting of patients with varying degrees of illness. We will also provide you with computerized learning opportunities that, in a case-based manner, comprehensively cover our curriculum. While under our supervision, we will provide prompt feedback to enable you to optimize your learning experience on Pediatrics. We will also be open to your feedback as well, and will work diligently to provide a positive, efficient atmosphere for learning.

Your commitment to us: We expect that as third-year medical students, you come to the Pediatric Clerkship prepared to learn more about the care of children. This should be a priority for you while you are on this clerkship. We expect that you give 100% to each patient encounter, and that your capabilities to provide care to this population will grow over the course of the rotation. We expect that you will conduct yourself in a professional manner, including timeliness, professional courtesy, dress, and regard to provision of patient care as a member of the health care team. Finally, should there be obstacles in your achievement of these expectations, we expect that you discuss those concerns with us in a prompt manner, so that when possible, we can work with you to quickly find a solution to the problem.