Medical Student Teaching:
The Neurology Clerkship is extremely popular with the medical students. At all sites, residents are responsible for direct education of medical students rotating on the neurology clerkship. This includes supervising their ability to take an effective history and perform a neurological exam, facilitating their presentations on rounds, and assigning them brief topic presentations to be reviewed and discussed on attending rounds.
Clinical rotation requirements:
- Red card topics - students must cover these topics during the rotation
(1) head trauma, (2) stroke, (3) seizure, (4) herniation syndromes, (5) spinal cord compression
Observed physical exam
Mid-rotation feedback form (see below)
Residents interested in teaching can become involved in the second year preclinical neurology course. Mount Sinai also has an active, AAN-registered Student Interest Group in Neurology (SIGN) chapter. Residents are encouraged to attend SIGN meetings and, in some cases, have served as mentors for students interested in neurology.
Medical Student Feedback:
Medical students at Mount Sinai are evaluated by both their residents and attendings based on their performance on the rotation categorized by AAMC competencies. It is important to provide meaningful feedback throughout the rotation as well as in the final evaluation. As a guide, feedback sessions with the senior resident should be held at least twice during the rotation, at the halfway point (with a written evaluation reviewed with the student), and at the end (see below). The PGY-3 residents perform these roles for the students and interns on their teams at Elmhurst Hospital and the Bronx VA.
At the end of the rotations, in addition to providing formative written evaluations of students, residents (and attendings) are asked to complete a numerical assessment of their performance on a 5-point scale in each of 12 clinical domains. The total of these points, averaged across all resident and attending evaluators, directly determine the majority of a student's grade in their clerkship. It is therefore very important to take care in assigning the points in a way that you think fairly represents their overall performance. As a rough guide, for any given clinical domain, a score of 5 translates to Honors, 4 translates to High Pass, and 3 translates to Pass. A score of 1 or 2 is substandard and would potentially lead the student to fail the rotation. Please faithfully evaluate each student in each domain without regard for personality differences or other aspects outside of their clinical acumen.