The role of family and emergency medicine in undergraduate medical education.

Clinical clerks electing emergency and family medicine rotations during the 1977 and 1978 academic years at the University of Calgary Faculty of Medicine evaluated their clerkships on the opportunities provided to learn new useful medical knowledge, learn new clinical skills and practice them. All rotations were perceived as providing excellent opportunities to learn medical knowledge. However, nearly 20% of students felt that four of the teaching hospital ward based specialty and subspecialty rotations failed to provide them with a satisfactory opportunity to learn new clinical skills and even a greater number were lacking practice opportunities. On the other hand, emergency and family medicine were generally rated very favorably in providing these opportunities.