The five-minute teaching opportunity
Every patient encounter is a teaching opportunity if you frame it correctly. The SNAPPS model — Summarise, Narrow, Analyse, Probe, Plan, Select — takes under five minutes, engages the trainee's reasoning process, and provides genuine formative feedback.
Building the 40-minute SHO session
A high-yield SHO session needs three elements: a clinical hook that creates genuine uncertainty, a structured framework, and a test to close the loop. The abdominal emergencies deck at Conquest Hospital used this structure — each slide answered one clinical question, and the final ten minutes was a case-based quiz under time pressure.
What trainees actually remember
Trainees remember cases, mnemonics, and contrasts. They remember where the diagnosis was missed and the outcome was bad. Teach through decisions, not facts. Facts are Googleable. Clinical reasoning — how to think through an undifferentiated patient with a deteriorating GCS at 3 AM — is not.
The role of clinical uncertainty
The most honest thing you can say is: 'I don't know, and here is how I would find out.' Medicine taught without uncertainty is medicine taught wrong. Model safe uncertainty: acknowledge the limits of guidelines, demonstrate when to seek senior help.
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