NEOMED Medical Students on Clerkships at University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center

UH Research & Education Update | January 2022

In March of this year, University Hospitals and NEOMED announced the plan to expand their partnership to include clinical training of a limited number of 3rd year NEOMED medical students at University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center and UH community medical centers each year.

This partnership aims to increase the training of medical students “from and for Ohio.” The new NEOMED clerkship rotations began in July 2021. As part of that initiative and to roll out our inaugural effort, UH solicited input from NEOMED leaders early this year to assess which initial rotations created by University Hospitals would fill the NEOMED clerkship gaps and most meet the needs of the upcoming third year 2023 NEOMED class. The NEOMED education leaders shared that the greatest need at that time was student placement in pediatrics, psychiatry, and obstetrics-gynecology clerkship rotation slots. In keeping with this request, clerkship rotations for 16 students in pediatrics, psychiatry, and obstetrics-gynecology plus an additional 16 family medicine spots began in July 2021, the start of their academic year.

The Pediatric 3rd year clerkship rotation is based at UH Rainbow Babies & Children Hospitals and includes time spent at outpatient pediatric offices. Psychiatry students rotate at UH Rainbow Babies & Children's Hospital, also on the combined Med-Psych ward and have outpatient emergency room work. The Obstetrics-Gynecology clerkship occurs at St. John Medical Center in Westlake with some outpatient rotations in Elyria. All aspects of the Family Medicine rotation are at St. John Medical Center.

In June, NEOMED provided a preliminary roster of 65 students assigned to these four clerkship rotations. In addition, a previously established Emergency Medicine UH clerkship site at Portage, under the direction of Nikolas Sekoulopoulos, MD, continued to offer rotation positions to an additional 13 students. Thus University Hospitals offered 78 NEOMED 3rd-year clerkship rotation opportunities.

Our inaugural NEOMED UH clinical site directors Erum Ahmad, MD in psychiatry, Katherine Griswold, MD in pediatrics, Peter Gotsis, DO in family medicine, and Kristen Klosterman, MD in obstetrics and gynecology. These clinician-educators have new NEOMED appointments and have developed clerkship curriculums to match the NEOMED educational goals and objectives. Additionally, we are pleased to announce that UH has created a NEOMED medical student coordinator position and recently appointed Sarah Majkrzak to serve in this role. 

Sarah will support our clinical site directors regarding student onboarding, student schedules, communication with teaching faculty and house staff, and completion of student evaluations.

The initial evaluations from the students participating in these rotations have been overwhelmingly positive. As a result, we are ready to expand in keeping with leadership's initial vision to include the addition of Internal Medicine and Surgery clerkships to complete the whole cohort of NEOMED 3rd year clerkships. We are actively recruiting clinical site directors within these two additional disciplines. We expect to place NEOMED clerkship students in the newly developed Medicine and Surgery clerkships at the beginning of NEOMED’s next academic year, July 2022. If interested in this position, clinical educators should email Sarah Majkrzak, who will forward the information accordingly. 

Learn more about the Medical Student Rotations.