You Down WIth CPC?
I just wanted to write about a recent (positive) development at my job. It was the lecture competition at our institution. Officially, it was called the Clinical Pathologic Case (CPC) Competition. This was my second year participating in it and it was generally a lot of fun. For many students and residents, it was their favorite day of lectures. It was structured as follows:
(1) The resident presents a history and physical of an interesting patient they saw. They omit the final diagnosis. (5 minutes)
(2) The faculty member discusses the thinking process behind how one would arrive at the diagnosis and makes an educated guess at the diagnosis (15 minutes).
(3) The resident returns and reveals the diagnosis and then teaches the audience a little about the disease (10 minutes)
Generally, it was really challenging for the resident because they had to find a good case. It couldn't just be something completely off the wall and rare. It had to be solvable, and realistically solvable by someone working in the emergency department. For example, the one case that I was given was a 2-year-old that ended up having Mono... you know, what's generally referred to as a "kissing disease" which can give you a sore throat, swollen lymph nodes etc... Except this patient had such a rare complication from Mono infection that the symptoms he arrived with in the emergency department could make one think he had a whole host of other illnesses (anything from a stroke to carbon monoxide poisoning to lyme disease etc...)
It was challenging from my standpoint because I had to turn something that's hard to describe in a linear fashion (basically a thinking process) into a lecture. Faculty members didn't win just by getting the answer right (about 75% of us got the right answer.) Nor did simply entertaining the audience win the competition, although that was important too. After all, you had to hold their attention. I think it was especially challenging for me because I went last and their attention was waning because they had already heard 3 1/2 hrs of everyone else's lectures. What the judges emphasized this year was that we had to teach too. The point of these CPC presentations was that we were teaching residents and students how to think their was through a difficult case. Basically, what won the competition had to have all the components of any good lecture: have good content, hold the attention of your audience, and impart change in the audience.
So I guess you know where this is going... I won.
Megan is probably tired of me making a big deal about this, but it's a big deal to me. I always thought I was a terrible public speaker. I had classic stage fright right before I went on. My heart was racing, my palms were sweaty and I questioned why I entered this competition to begin with. I didn't know if I had the right answer yet, and I didn't want to lose credibility in front of the people I was supposed to be training. So yeah. It was a big deal to me when they announced the winner.
So thanks for reading this. It was nice for me to write this... take that final victory lap... before I moved on.
posted by myk at 1:47 AM
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