Today is SOO prep day. For anyone who doesn't know - SOO stands for structured office orals and they are an integral part of the Canadian College of Family Physicians exam. We have some medical students visiting our family practice unit this month so we're using them as standardized patients to practice our SOO skills. I'm not sure how this is going to go! SOOs are complex and you really need to figure out a pattern of how to approach them because the patient always has a primary problem and then a secondary problem you need to tease out of them during the interview. This second problem can be totally unrelated or be related to the presenting problem (when it's unrelated it can be difficult to pry it out of them and at times I've resorted to "is there anything else you would like to talk about today"). I worry about running out of time at the stations. We'll see how things go today!
3 comments:
Good luck today!
Funny... they actually taught us to explicitly ask "is there anything else you'd like to talk about today" near the beginning of the interview -- why is it bad that you're resorting to that? We're always supposed to check that there's nothing else they'd like to discuss after the patient has given an opening statement and as we're building an agenda with them for the visit. Apparently trying to make sure you've got all their concerns right at the beginning prevents a lot of "hand on the doorknob" issues. I guess if you have a patient who's not sure whether or not they want to talk about a sensitive issue then it won't help much though.
Ah, good luck! You could possibly attempt a raised-eyebrows-highly-attentive 'look' at the same time you ask them? ;)
"Is there anything else you'd like to talk about today?" never works in the SOOs. I think the actor is coached not to respond to this question honestly.
By the same token, I hate how in the SOOs you are expected to FIFE the patient without actually asking directly "How do you feel about this?" or "How has this affected your functioning?"
Bah!
I have a "tips for the soos" post on my blog.
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