Competence and Excellence in Medical Practice
I’ve been inspired by a colleague to write one last clinical reasoning blog before the KFP tomorrow. Don’t worry, it’s not going to be one of the usual deep and meaningful ones, just something to ponder whilst you’re trying to fill in your time until tomorrow. Let’s try a visualisation. You are tired of studying. […]
Don’t forget your brolly Read More »
With the Key Features Exam only a week away, the time for study planning and deep learning is long past. The focus now should be on successfully ‘playing the game’ to be successful. Here are some critical points to remember when approaching the KFP: It is a method by which the key decision-making steps in
Trumping the KFP – 10 tips for the perfect hand Read More »
Inquisitiveness can lead one into dangerous situations Whilst curiosity is not in truth a cognitive bias, I though it worth considering as part of these series of blogs exploring clinical reasoning and cognitive biases. Curiosity is an essential trait in medical practitioners and health professionals more broadly. Dyche and Epstein (2011) discuss the importance of curiosity to
How “curiosity can kill the cat” Read More »
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Family feud, metacognition, mud and the KFP Read More »
And the cognitive bias of the week is…..ZEBRA RETREAT! In my previous blogs I’ve been exploring the importance of generating a broad differential list early in the diagnostic process. This is particularly important to mitigate against biases such as premature closure and affective bias (‘gut-feel’). If we have generated a good differential list, it should
Retreat! It’s a zebra… Read More »
It’s day 5 of the Boxing Day test. You have great tickets and are catching up with some old mates. You’ve been to the MCG many times before but not in the last few years. You wake up late – too late to catch the train, so you jump in your car. On autopilot you
Clinical reasoning and the perfect CAATCHHH Read More »
Welcome to this week’s clinical reasoning bias – “The Bandwagon effect”: “the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same” Now I don’t even need to try and think of a clinical case to demonstrate this, as there as so many examples in the medical literature, but perhaps
Jumping on the Bandwagon Read More »
As a senior GP registrar about to sit exams I felt that I was brimming with knowledge. So why then was I still second guessing myself about certain patients at the end of the day? I spoke with my learned supervisor about this – he’s been in the game a long time and has a much
How much risk do you tolerate? Read More »
How do we know what we don’t know, especially if we’re sure that we know enough? Overconfidence when making clinical decisions is common in doctors, and particularly as we become more experienced clinicians. As GPs we see the most undifferentiated of presentations and we use one of two Systems in our brain to define the
Removing your clinical blinkers Read More »
So last weeks blog focused on anchoring bias. Remember Phillip with the ‘flu’ who unfortunately ended up with meningococcal meningitis? This week we are going to explore Information and availability bias. Information bias is the belief that the more information you can gather to support your decision the better. Now it is fair to say
When you can’t see the forest for the trees… Read More »