I’ve recently checked out the awesome (and free!) EMRAP: Educator’s Edition. In the April podcast, among many other things, Rob Rogers and Michelle Lin talked about how medical students often struggle to orally present cases the ‘emergency medicine way’. I remember struggling as a student to focus on what was relevant and stick to the important positives and negatives without droning on for ever (still do!). More recently a few students have asked me, “How should I present a patient in ED?”. Well, now I have a gold standard answer for them.
Following Rob Roger’s recommendation I checked out this paper:
Davenport C, Honigman B, Druck J. The 3-minute emergency medicine medical student presentation: a variation on a theme. Acad Emerg Med. 2008 Jul;15(7):683-7. [pubmed][free fulltext pdf]
Of special interest to medical students, Davenport and colleagues also made a great supplement to help medical students master the art of oral case presentation in ED.
Download the pdf supplement here.
The supplement is a must read for medical students — apart from making your presentations more efficient and meaningful, it will make life in ED less stressful, and make you look good too!
Remember that the student case presentation is the main way teachers in ED judge the abilities of their students (for better or worse).
About Chris Nickson
Thanks for the link! I will be starting my 4th year with Emergency Medicine in August… ED presentations certainly are a challenge — so much thinking needs to happen reflexively and condensed into such a small amount of time!
I’ll be sure to disseminate to the article to my class as well.
Good luck Clinton. Hope your enjoy your experience in Emergency later this year. Hope the case presentation info is helpful.
A quote from Osler to keep in mind while in time pressured atmosphere of Emergency Medicine:
“Hurry? Never hurry -- hurry is the devil. More people are killed by hurry than by disease.”