Objective: To provide a rationale for integrating experience into early medical education ("early experience").
Design: Small group discussions to obtain stakeholders' views. Grounded theory analysis with respondent, internal, and external validation.
Setting: Problem based, undergraduate medical curriculum that is not vertically integrated.
Participants: A purposive sample of 64 students, staff, and curriculum leaders from three university medical schools in the United Kingdom.
Results: Without early experience, the curriculum was socially isolating and divorced from clinical practice. The abruptness of students' transition to the clinical environment in year 3 generated positive and negative emotions. The rationale for early experience would be to ease the transition; orientate the curriculum towards the social context of practice; make students more confident to approach patients; motivate them; increase their awareness of themselves and others; strengthen, deepen, and contextualise their theoretical knowledge; teach intellectual skills; strengthen learning of behavioural and social sciences; and teach them about the role of health professionals.
Conclusion: A rationale for early experience would be to strengthen and deepen cognitively, broaden affectively, contextualise, and integrate medical education. This is partly a process of professional socialisation that should start earlier to avoid an abrupt transition. "Experience" can be defined as "authentic human contact in a social or clinical context that enhances learning of health, illness or disease, and the role of the health professional."