Purpose: The duration of family medicine clerkship (FMC) in Taiwan ranges from one to six weeks, and the contents of the program varies from hospital to hospital. The study accordingly aimed to investigate the learning domains and the core contents of FMC in Taiwan, based on a mixed method design.
Methods: For the qualitative content analysis of Phase One, 15 physicians and five medical students from five medical centers (two in northern Taiwan, one in central, one in southern, and one in eastern Taiwan) were invited to participate in an in-depth interview with three physicians and one medical student among the interviewees requested to join a focus group to collect data concerning their opinions about the goal, learning domains, and curriculum contents of FMC and their expectations and suggestions. For the quantity analysis of Phase Two, 27 professors of family medicine from seven medical schools were invited to complete an expert questionnaire on topics and contents of family medicine clerkship. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and the fuzzy Delphi method (FDM) were used to evaluate the importance of the topics and contents.
Results: Based on the results of qualitative content analysis, six learning domains and 18 curriculum contents were constructed. The learning domains included family practice, illness, behavior science, preventive medicine, community medicine, and long-term care. For quantity analysis, AHP found all the six learning domains important as their weighted scores exceeded 0.1. From FDM, the core contents of the six learning domains were respectively family practice, emergency referral, patientcentered care, preventive medicine, community medicine, and functional assessment.
Conclusion: The study used a mixed method design to construct the FMC training framework. 6 learning domains and 18 core contents are proposed and the results can be expected to provide medical schools with a reference for developing suitable syllabi meeting their individual needs and concerns.