This may be prepared videos or videos your educators ask you to bring in.      This is a valuable way of getting feedback on how to perform even better.    You might at first feel reluctant and shy at showing yours – but everyone does!   Be brave and overcome this “video allergy”.   Don’t worry, the educator will ensure your feedback is balanced and not painful.  And prepare to be surprised how how much you get from such sessions.   Please make sure your video actually works and set it to the right point that you want to watch it from.  It saves a lot of faffing on the day.

This may be a case that someone has written up or someone from the group presents.  The great thing about cases is that it is learning based on REAL LIFE experience.   We call this experiential learning.  It is one of the most powerful ways to learn and remember things.   

Feelings are important.  The way we feel about things often determine our behaviour.    And sometimes, the key to doing the right thing is examining our feelings and working on those.   For example, a trainee in the practice once presented a patient with knee pain who he thought was wasting doctor’s time because he just wanted a sick note.   But on further enquiry, he hadn’t really taken a good MSK history.   The patient had actually twisted his knee 6 months prior, and it swelled immediately but did not seek medical advice.   He presented now as it was interfering with walking and it still remained swollen.   An MRI showed a meniscal tear.   Why had the trainee missed this and jumped to the “wanting a sick note” conclusions?  He said he knew that twisting injuries had a high rate of internal knee damage.  We explored this, and the trainee was honest.  He saw the patient as unemployed and this made him conclude that this patient does not contribute to society and therefore was a fair bit against the patient right from the start.  Because he made early conclusions about the patient’s work ethic without really asking him, he ended up doing a bad clinical job.   In other words, his attitudes and feelings on this occasion affected his clinical performance.  And it could not be rectified without tackling this first. 

Where actors are trained to play a particular patient role enabling you to practice your skills with them.  This is great for fine tuning your skills and making mistakes rather than subjecting that on patients.

Real patients might be bought in not only to show you clinical signs but for their experience of the disease on their lives (= the illness).  Where patients come in to tell you first hand about their experiences so that you truly understand how diseases affect people’s lives.     The effect of the dis-ease on the patient’s life is called “the illness”.  Being a GP is all about understanding the illness, which is often not covered in clinical textbooks because every patient’s experience in unique and individual.    If we are to help with alleviating suffering, one needs to understand the illness and not just the clinical features of something.  Understanding the illness is powerful stuff!   (And a massive thing in the CSA)