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Clerkship Overview
The neurology clerkship is a four-week required clinical rotation. During their third or fourth year, medical students will rotate through service sites at Hamad General Hospital where they will be exposed to the outpatient, inpatient and emergent management of patients with neurological illness like seizures, strokes, coma and spinal cord compression. Students learn how to summarize the case history and findings on neurological examination, localizing the lesion by clinical reasoning
Medical Student Curriculum
In addition to weekly neurology conferences, a specific set of daily didactic lectures and interactive sessions has been designed for medical student education in clinical neurology. The conferences are designed to provide students with a framework for the study and practice of clinical neurology.
The students will attend morning reports and will join their assigned clinical team to round on the inpatient services or attend to patients in the outpatient clinics. The student is responsible for evaluating and managing patients daily under immediate supervision by hospital staff, who oversee, modify and approve the final management and treatment plans.
The neurology core curriculum takes place daily in the morning or the afternoon with didactic sessions, student presentations and workshops. Topics discussed in the didactic sessions include: the
neurological method, headache, cerebrovascular disease, clinical approach to weakness, neuro-infectious diseases, seizures and epilepsy, delirium and dementia, movement disorders, multiple sclerosis, pediatric neurology and neuro-ethics. Additionally, clinical tutors at the hospital give lectures on lesion localization, neuroimaging, EEG, EMG, fundoscopy, psychogenic seizures, coma and other topics of interest to the tutor on call.
Student Assessment and Evaluation
Hospital and college tutors give ongoing feedback on a daily basis during inpatient ward rounds, outpatient clinics or group educational discussions. Every student has a formal one-on-one feedback session mid-clerkship when formative assessment and a plan for improvement are shared with the student. Other means of feedback include OSCE (objective structured clinical examination) sessions, USMLE questions for learning, and student- or tutor-initiated ad hoc feedback sessions. The final clerkship grade consists of four components; namely, the National Board of Medical Examiners Clinical Neurology Shelf Examination (NBME), clinical assessment by tutors, case write-ups, and two open-book quizzes. Like other clinical clerkships, neurology is graded on the Cornell system of: honors, high pass, pass and fail. Grading in this clerkship is transparent.
Clerkship Director: Salman Al-Jerdi, MD
Associate Clerkship Director: Khaled Zamel, MBChB
Staff Support: ocs@qatar-med.cornell.edu