Medical students in community physicians' offices

Can the medical student benefit from spending time in the offices of community physicians? Eight consecutive final-year medical students visited the offices of 39 physicians, 31 family physicians and eight specialists, in the communities of Richmond and Delta, British Columbia. The students describe the value of their experience, common problems seen, continuity of care, practice variation, opportunities in specialist office practice and the standard of practice observed. We strongly suggest that some medical student instruction must take place in the community to ensure improved patient care from doctors with a reality-based training. All students, whatever their eventual area of work, would benefit from this experience and we recommend that other centres try similar experiments.