The logic and chronology of consultations in general practice - Teaching consultation skills in medical school

This article was migrated. The article was not marked as recommended. Introduction Teaching consultation skills requires a structured description of consultations. The objective of this is to describe how consultation topics may be classified and ordered logically. Methods All our last semester medical students make video recordings of their consultations with real patients. The feedback method is systematically developed into a grading system that takes into account both structure and content.This includes the relevance of the topics handled, the extent to which they cover all aspects of the clinical problems of the patient, whether the goal of each step is reached, and the extent to which the topics are handled in the logical order. Results The consultation may be described in nine steps. The order of steps is based on the logic of clinical reasoning. Each topic can only be placed on one step. The steps and logic is shown in Table 1. Figure 1 shows the relationship between the theoretical logic and the actual chronological order of events in the consultation (Table 1, Figure 1). Conclusion and Practice Implications The analysis is straightforward and may be used when teaching. The system is being developed further for pre- and post-graduate use in research and quality development.