Stations of MFDS Part 2

History Taking

"A patient attends to your clinic for the first time. Please take a detailed history and manage the patient concerns accordingly."

• very little information (yes! as little as almost nothing to take note from the question paper given, 80-90% of the info were given by the patient) if...
• you ask the proper questions
• take detailed history
• diagnose and manage the whole case (make sure you know the differential diagnosis well)

Explanation and Interpretation of Investigations

• radiographs, clinical photographs, reports (too much information! you will need to skim through sometimes 3 pages for 1 question within the 1 minute and half, and pick the right info in mind)
• explain the findings
• take medical, dental, social history (just a brief one sometimes, if you go through the sample questions, you get marked for history taking regardless)
• diagnosis, prognosis, treatment plan (do not go with the less common diagnosis and treatment options; pros, cons, risks needed to be explained, )

Managing Patient Concerns

• Show empathy
• Communication skills
• And you will still need to cover some of the parts as above.

Good Tips

👉

 The invigilator told us that overall it is not about coming to the 100% correct for diagnosis and treatment plan like how you were expected to be during your undergrad time.

👉 

Make sure it should be a 2-way conversation, you are not supposed to do most of the talking, you should listen to the patient, pause from time to time, let patient to express their concerns and sometimes emotions.

👉 You can practice by phrasing or rephrasing the sentence when you communicate with your patients, for example :

"Good morning, Mr/Mdm/Ms ___. I'm Dr ___ and I'll be the dentist seeing you today. How can I help you?"

👉 Go with open ended questions, sometimes the patient will explain as if they have memorized the scripts, for example :

"Can you describe the pain to me?" instead of "Was it a throbbing pain? How long was the pain?" 

👉 Show patient just enough empathy (does not have to be all the time, once or twice is enough) for example :

"I'm so sorry to hear about the pain you are suffering from, please do not worry, I'll do my best to sort it out for you."

Basically, if you are already at the stage of taking MFDS Part 2, I believe that the basic dental knowledge should not be an issue to you right 😂. For me, I've put more effort into learning how to talk professionally yet simple for patient to understand. Feel free to watch some YouTube videos as well, there are couple of good ones, just search for it, practice more, you will get the hang of it! Trust me! 💪