Reinventing the third-year medical student

For nearly a century, the third year of medical school has been a pivotal point in training, a crucial step in the development of professional skills and attitudes toward patients. Recently, however, the tradition of monthlong "rotations" has come under fire. Now a growing number of educators are working to reinvent the crucial third year of medical school. A recent article in the journal Academic Medicine explains how one program has successfully eliminated traditional block rotations, promoting instead yearlong relationships between students and their patients and capitalizing on the patient-centered values and humanistic impulses that led the students to medicine in the first place.