Learning activities include introductory classroom sessions to introduce students to common presentations in primary care, Family Practice Attachments with primary care doctors working in the community, clinical consultation sessions in the HA General Outpatient Clinics and various workshops designed to promote skill acquisition for clinical problem solving and synthesis. The clerkship culminates in a debriefing session for students to reflect on learning.

By the end of this clerkship, students are expected to be able to:

• take a relevant history, identify and interpret the reasons for consultation, ideas, concerns and expectations among patients presenting to primary care
• adopt a hypothetical deductive method of clinical problem solving to generate diagnostic hypotheses for undifferentiated symptoms presenting to primary care
• make a diagnosis on the common illnesses presenting to primary care
• describe the inter-relationship of psychosocial and physical factors in health and illnesses specific to individual patients
• explore how family members may influence or be affected by the patient’s illness
• identify the nature of the doctor-patient relationship and its therapeutic potentialss
• observe and explain the different roles of family doctors