The 3rd Year Medical School Integrated Clerkship
Cambridge Health Alliance developed the Cambridge Integrated Clerkship, in which Harvard Medical Students choose to spend the entire third year at institution in an integrated, longitudinal year-long educational experience. Since then, this model has expanded from the Cambridge Health Alliance to the other Harvard teaching hospitals. The clerkship emphasizes longitudinal contacts with patients in a community setting to assure a full and complete understanding of human disease and recovery, prevention and the experience of illness. The twelve CIC Students experience 'whole episodes' of illness and the follow-up of patients in their homes, rehabilitation facilities and nursing homes, encounter patients of multiple economic, social and cultural strata and appreciate the role of these factors in illness. Students have hands-on patient contacts in all of the disciplines.
Cambridge Health Alliance provides a formal curriculum including psychiatry, medicine, surgery and pediatrics, as well as basic science, health policy, public health, education that is vertically and horizontally-integrated and grounded in adult educational principles designed to extend and expand the students' knowledge base and clinical skills.
HIV Psychiatry
CHA hosts one or two 4th year medical students who participate in an American Psychiatric Association sponsored Minority Medical Student Elective in HIV Psychiatry in the Zinberg Clinic. Students apply nationally through the APA and 8 students are chosen for a month long elective in September at one of 5 sites around the U.S. in HIV care centers. Dr. Marshall Forstein serves as a member of the Steering Committee of the APA on HIV Psychiatry that provides the training and mentoring. Medical Students can apply through the Office of HIV Psychiatry at the American Psychiatric Association.