General Practice Skills
We’re proud to present General Practitioner Skills, an educational program to help you hone skills critical for every general practitioner.
Throughout 2024, we’ll be tackling history-taking, making a master problem list, compiling differentials, and utilizing heuristics/patterns, each with an interactive feature that will take your diagnostic acumen to the next level, no matter where you are in your career.
Challenge yourself to rethink your heuristics approach with the latest in our series.
Being an excellent veterinary diagnostician depends on a solid foundation in the basics: the critical skills we use daily to identify a patient’s core problems, narrow down potential causes, and propose a path forward for both the pet and owner.
These skills are not ones that are ever truly mastered, but instead are refined through daily practice and being open to adapting as new information is acquired.
Take yourself back to the basics with the line-up of cases below.
Challenge Yourself: General Practice Skills
Obtaining a comprehensive patient history is just as important as physical examination skills when it comes to optimizing patient care. Brush up on important history taking techniques and test your knowledge when it comes to anamnesis.
Generating and maintaining problem lists not only helps streamline the diagnostic process but also facilitates transfer of care when needed. This interactive feature will hone your skills at creating a problem list that sets you on the correct diagnostic path.
Picking out relevant details from the history, clinical signs, and physical examination to create a meaningful differential diagnosis list is a skill that takes experience and practice to master. Level up your differential diagnosis game with our interactive, case-based article.
Explore More Basics
Learn how to select and evaluate information, identify strengths and weaknesses, and decide a study’s relevance to your clinic.
Effective case assessment requires more than just medical knowledge. Make more successful diagnoses with this approach to clinical reasoning.
Doing the best for our patients means knowing what's best to do. Learn how to ask the right questions and critically assess evidence to ensure you practice the best medicine.
Pulse palpation is essential to a complete physical examination. This video discusses the basics of palpating pulses.
There are 12 components of a basic cardiology examination. Can you name them all?
Add this video to your favorites for a refresher on how to assess BCS and MCS.
The neurologic examination is a series of observations and tests that determine if a lesion is present, where it is located, and how severe the lesion is.
Understand fluid types, indications, and calculations for creating a treatment plan with this guide.
A thorough ear examination involves 3 independent parts. This step-by-step guide walks you through a comprehensive evaluation from start to finish.