Key Insights
- Tell a story, not just a medical history.
- Know your audience, and adjust your level of detail.
- Deliver with confidence, clarity, and purpose.
As a doctor or other medical professional, your job is to protect and improve the health of your patients, but doing that requires communicating their story to others. A patient case presentation feels simple, but it’s a deceptively specific and specialized skill. When doctors struggle to present a case clearly, they often feel ashamed or frustrated. “I went through years and years of medical school, I’m a world class physician and yet….I get tripped up by telling others about my patients? What gives!?”
Use the following three tips to help elevate your communication skills:
Tell A Story, Not Just a Medical History
Every patient is a person beyond the numbers in their chart. Tell their story. Start with the problem, give the diagnostic journey, highlight the critical decisions, and the outcome. Rather than overwhelming your audience with every clinical detail, select the information that helps them understand the case and its significance. A helpful exercise: If you turned this patience case into a children’s book, what would it say?
Know Your Audience and Adjust Your Level of Detail
Are you presenting to specialists? Residents? A multidisciplinary team? Consider what your audience already knows, what they need to understand, and what you need them to remember. Remember, it’s not about the amount of information you share. The way you wrap it up and present it will vary based on your audience. If you’re saying the same words in the same way to all audiences, you’re likely not speaking as effectively as you can.
Deliver with Confidence, Clarity and Purpose
As you’re telling the story of your patient, speak clearly, slowly, and with appropriate pauses and emphasis so it sounds like you’re communicating a story you know, not reading it from a chart for the very first time. Confident communication doesn’t feel hurried, and it has an underlying passion and purpose that conveys your connection to the material. If you find yourself speaking quickly to get through all of the information, you need to find a way to say less, not speak faster.
I have clients who meet with me before every case presentation to practice and get feedback. If you’d like to give that a try, reach out to Emily@EmilySchwartzSpeaks.com for more information.
