PC3103: Developing Well-rounded Medical Students: The Pediatric Academic Medicine Summer Preceptorship Program

Background: The summer between a medical student’s first and second year provides a unique opportunity to explore individual interests in medicine. However, the summer programs currently offered are dedicated to either clinical exposure or research experience. For a student who desires an integration of both, there are very limited pre-existing programs. To fill this gap and provide early exposure to academic medicine, we developed the Pediatric Academic Medicine Summer Preceptorship Program (PAMSPP). This program incorporates clinical and scholarly experiences within academic medicine while introducing students to advocacy and education.

Methods: Each student partners with a faculty mentor in the Department of Pediatrics for 8 weeks. Together with mentoring faculty, the student develops an individualized program based on their goals within the program’s core pillars of clinical exposure, scholarly activity, education, and advocacy. Within the clinical time, the student works with both inpatient and outpatient pediatric faculty, as well as selects cases for presentation and/or develops a scholarly question for their research project. During the program, the student participates in or leads an advocacy project. Lastly, the student is exposed to a physician’s role as an educator and in turn, creates an opportunity to teach others.

Results: PAMSPP was piloted summer 2020 with one student-faculty pair, a beta test was completed summer 2021 with three student-faculty pairs, and McGovern's Department of Pediatrics accepted this model as a funded program for five students for summer 2022. The students mentored by faculty in the Department of Pediatrics experienced a variety of clinical activities, including primary care, hospital medicine, orthopedic surgery, physical medicine and rehabilitation, and cardiology. Academically, our students won first place at the Texas Pediatric Society case report poster competition, presented advocacy and research to the City of Houston Council on Disabilities, developed research and quality improvement projects in the areas of medical education, diversity in medicine, and PMR, and provided education to other medical students and medical ancillary staff (Table 1). Furthermore, a recent quality improvement study conducted at McGovern by one of PAMSPP’s students showed that 76% of medical students indicated that their ideal summer program would consist of most if not all the pillars PAMSPP strives to meet.

Conclusion: PAMSPP builds physician mentorship, provides early exposure to academic medicine, and equips students with research, clinical, teaching, and advocacy skills. Since few published academic medicine programs for students exist, we have the unique opportunity to model a successful summer program for medical schools throughout the country.