Introduction

So, a consultant turns to you and says, “imagine you are the F1 on-call covering all the medical wards”. You already know that the next 5-10 minutes is going to be a lot of fumbling and waffle. No more! I’m going to be running through the key steps to take when approaching an acutely unwell patient all the way from “taking the phone call” to “managing the patient”. This is an inevitable scenario both in your OSCEs and in real life clinical practice. So, stay tuned for this series where I’ll be covering “things to ask on the phone”, “initial assessment”, “investigations” and finally, “management”.