medical student’s use of time during clinical clerkships and thecredits based system

Introduction: Comprehensive undergraduateeducation in clinical sciences is groundedon activities developed during clerkships. Toimplement the credits system we must knowhow these experiences take place.Objectives: to describe how students spendtime in clerkships, how they assess the educativevalue of activities and the enjoyment it provides.Method: We distributed a form to a randomclustered sample of a 100 students coursing clinicalsciences, designed to record the time spent,and to assess the educative value and the gradeof enjoyment of the activities in clerkship duringa week. Data were registered and analyzed onExcel® 98 and SPSS.Results: mean time spent by students inclerkship activities on a day were 10.8 hours. Ofthose, 7.3 hours (69%) were spent in formaleducation activities. Patient care activities withteachers occupied the major proportion of time(15.4%). Of the teaching and learning activitiesin a week, 28 hours (56%) were spent in patientcare activities and 22.4 hours (44.5%) were usedin independent academic work. The time spentin teaching and learning activities correspondto 19 credits of a semester of 18 weeks. Theactivities assessed as having the major educationalvalue were homework activities (4.6) andformal education activities (4.5). The graded asmost enjoyable were extracurricular activities,formal educational activities and independentacademic work.Conclusion: our students spend more time inactivities with patients than the reported in literature.The attending workload of our students isgreater than the one reported in similar studies.