Look at the patient and follow your gut

The best advice I ever received as a student was to look at the patient and not the screen; I still practise by this advice even now—especially now—as a clinician. Although I tried to implement this as much as I could when I was a student, I never fully understood the importance of that simple phrase until I became autonomous. Once you qualify, you finally break away from that safety net; the experience of which is both terrifying and freeing at the same time. This allows you to follow your gut and intuition—skills that do not always come naturally as a student as the systematic approach is drilled in from early doors. Although the systematic method of assessing patients provides a logical and structured format, once you build your intuition, you can use that initial presentation as a guide to help you formulate a plan.

In most cases, all the information you need is there in front of you—whether they are life-threatening or non-life-threatening emergencies—the same principle can be applied. Just by looking at the patient, you can gain so much information that can often be overlooked. The next time you are out in practice, stand back for a moment and just look at the patient in front of you; look at their posture, their hand positioning, note whether they can maintain eye contact, their appearance, their work of breathing, the environment they are in. Let yourself start to build that initial gut instinct and you will find that the assessment will become a lot smoother and more intuitive. Do not let yourself become distracted so early on by clinical observations which can often lead you astray from the true presenting condition, and from what the patient truly needs from you.