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Crammer's corner
GP, Chapelgreen practice, Sheffield, RCGP Examiner and Blueprint clinical lead, Associate Postgraduate Dean Yorkshire and the Humber Deanery
E-mail: amar.rughani@sheffield.ac.uk
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
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Making a diagnosis/making decisions |
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| This performance area is about a conscious, structured approach to decision making.
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This performance area follows on from data gathering which is not an end in itself, but provides information for making diagnoses and making decisions. We can see that this area is not simply about the clinical arena, although this is the most important one. It also encompasses problem solving more widely, where decisions have to be reached about problems that may not be clinical, but have an impact on health. For example, GPs often have to make decisions that are related to employment, housing and social benefits.
We will now look at each of the word pictures in Fig. 1 in turn:
- Taking relevant data into account, clarifies the problem and the nature of the decision required.
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In a sense, the whole of this competency progression is about ‘clarifying the problem’. At this basic
Using audit to make decisions
Tip: aiding pattern recognition
Question: how can alcoholism be spotted earlier from the records?
Tip: improving our diagnostic use of time
Tip: learning how to critique the guidelines
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