Integrated Community Clerkship

Introduction and Background

The Rural Integrated Community Clerkship (Rural ICC) is a core clerkship option for third-year medical students. Students will be placed in an Alberta rural community for approximately 42 weeks. Rural ICC uses regional family medicine practices as the core experience. Students are provided with continuous patient care, preceptor supervision and learning experiences.

The Office of Rural and Region Health believes that the continuity of care, continuity of preceptor and continuity of community found in the ICC program gives students several professional advantages. These include:

• The establishment of meaningful therapeutic relationships
• Experience handling undifferentiated problems
• Co-coordinating the care of individuals with chronic diseases
• Integrated assessment and management of the key illnesses seen in core disciplines of medicine

The Rural ICC was developed in collaboration with the University of Alberta and was implemented in September 2007. The Rural ICC Program is part of a worldwide movement of Longitudinal Integrated Clerkships (LIC) and has been implemented at six other Canadian medical schools. Similar programs have also been applied across the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom. In March 2008, Rural ICC began operating at the University of Calgary.

If you have questions regarding the program, please contact the ICC program administrator at  iccume@ualberta.ca.

The Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry would like to acknowledge the support of the Health Workforce Action Plan for funding this program.

Integrated Community Clerkship Sites

Community sites for the coming academic year are not finalized until January and are subject to change.  If there are sites not on our list that you are interested in, do let us know iccume@ualberta.ca as site recruitment is an ongoing process.  

For further information you can reach us here

ICC Program Administrator
Office of Rural & Regional Health
Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry
5-309 Edmonton Clinic Health Academy

Email: iccume@ualberta.ca