Oral Health | Clinical and Risk Asessment | What are diagnostic skills?

What are diagnostic skills?
Session overview
Description
This session outlines the basic skills required to deliver effective diagnoses. It will form an introduction to the further learning delivered within this programme that will complement these skills.

Learning objectives
By the end of this session you will be able to:

• explain the need to record diagnoses for all patients
• devise a schematic sequence to arrive at a diagnosis
• describe where to obtain the knowledge to allow differential diagnosis skills to be refined

Prerequisites
Before commencing this session you should have:

• experience in gathering information from patients
• basic knowledge of the diagnostic process

This session will define and introduce the skills required by a clinician to assess the potential diagnoses of any patient with one or more presenting conditions.

It will also describe the technique of differential diagnosis. This is where the clinician considers a range of probable diagnostic options of the presenting condition, before arriving at a specific diagnosis for the patient.

The process can be divided into 2 parts:

• information gathering
• information analysis