WRITING CASE WRITE-UPS
As a medical student, one of the key skills one should learn is how to write.
Writing is an essential skill in communication and should be learned primarily because it will be important for your future career.
The surgeon, despite performing surgical skills, must be able to describe, in writing, how they performed the operation in a way that other professionals can understand and follow. The physician or pediatrician must be able to write coherent notes describing the history of the illness, what he/she found on examination and the management plan in a cogent manner.
A researcher must be able to explain why they want to conduct research and describe in a coherent manner what research questions and methods they intend to use to answer the research questions. They must also be able to publish the results of their research in a journal that typically accepts papers of up to 3500 words. Sometimes they must convince policy makers about adopting their intervention using a policy brief that could be as long as only 1-2 pages or they may have to communicate their results to the public (who don’t necessarily read scientific journal articles), in a 500 word newspaper article. You could also be that Director who needs to file reports with the board… It all starts here.
The news flash for you is that tomorrow, it might be you who fits any of the roles above.
Case write ups might look different depending on whether you are a junior or senior clerk. The case write up for the 3rd year student should emphasize a good extensive history and the subsequent sections that are indicated on the template. The senior clerk should focus on the examination and discussion. The wise student will look up journals that publish case reports and begin to look at how other individuals write. Ideally, the case write up should be your introduction to scientific/academic writing.
There is a tendency for students to bring the slang they use out there to this official writing experience- do not use slang in your case write up. Typically, you will be asked to submit between 3-5 write ups during your rotation. Choose patients with interesting case histories or a hospital course to write about. Either because the patient had an interesting, rare diagnosis or because there were certain rare diagnostics that needed to be done to nail the diagnosis. Either way, think about writing up on challenging patients where you need to do some digging in to the literature. The first one could be simple and straight forward, the rest should not be.
Aim to submit at least one write up a week. Challenge yourself to write or should I say type and submit PDF versions, which your lecturers can annotate comments on. You will improve your relationship with the keyboard, improve your official communication via email rather than your usual WhatsApp messaging, all in preparation for your future roles that we discussed in the opening paragraph.
Since your language of instruction is English, you might as well write good English, I recommend you download, read, and apply what you will learn from a book entitled “The Elements of Style” by William Strunk Jnr. It is an excellent text that will remind you about your punctuation and basic rules of writing.
Now go and start on that write up…..what are you waiting for? Read this again before you start though.
Dr. David Meya
Associate Professor of Medicine,
College of Health Sciences, Makerere University
Adjunct Professor of Medicine, Department of Infectious Diseases and International Health, University of Minnesota.
Compiled by Gakwerere Daniel, Year Five representative.