The case for resurrecting the long case

doi:10.1136/bmj.39583.596111.94

BMJ 2008;336:1250 (31 May), doi:10.1136/bmj.39583.596111.94

Views & Reviews

The case for resurrecting the long case

Narci C Teoh, senior lecturer in medicine¹, Francis J Bowden, professor of medicine¹

¹ Australian National University Medical School at The Canberra Hospital, Canberra

Correspondence to: F J Bowden frank.bowden@act.gov.au

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Reports of the death of the long case as a tool for assessingmedical students’ clinical skills may be greatly exaggerated.¹Unfortunately, the unintended consequence of highlighting itspoor inter-case reliability is that even the judicious use ofthe long case may be seen as being out of touch with moderneducational practice. In the ongoing struggle to improve thereliability of our assessment of students, we may forget thatknowing that a student will be examined in a particular waydetermines that student’s learning behaviour.

Firstly, a definition: at our school a long case is where astudent sees a real patient in a clinical setting, takes a history,examines the patient, makes a diagnosis, formulates a managementplan, and then presents this information and discusses the issuesarising from the case with a clinical tutor. Each long caseis marked against a set of criteria and graded. Students . . . [Full text of this article]

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