MBBS Case Presentation: A Practical Template for Clinical Postings
A useful case presentation helps your listener understand the patient’s story, the findings that matter and the questions still to be answered. It is not a race to recite every line of the case sheet.
This guide is for supervised learning and presentation practice, not diagnosis or treatment. Follow your department’s format and your supervisor’s instructions. If someone needs urgent assessment, seek help through your local escalation process rather than finishing a rehearsed presentation.
First, decide what kind of presentation you are giving
A new-patient presentation, a daily progress update and a request for urgent help serve different purposes. Ask your teacher what they expect before practising. The Clerkship Directors in Internal Medicine recommend adapting an oral presentation to its audience and purpose, including relevant rather than exhaustive information. Their guidance also stresses rehearsal and feedback. Read the CDIM clerkship primer, chapter 5.
For an MBBS teaching session, use the following scaffold, then adjust it to your college’s requirements. This is a learning aid, not an official examination marking scheme.
A case presentation template
Opening
Who are you presenting, what brought them for assessment, and over what time period?
Presenting history
Describe the sequence of events. Include relevant associated features and meaningful negatives you actually asked about.
Background
Select relevant previous illnesses or procedures, medicines, allergies, family history and social context.
Examination
Report findings you obtained, including relevant observations. Separate your examination from information documented by someone else.
Investigations
State available results with their dates or timing. Make clear which results are pending or unavailable.
Interpretation
Summarise the main problems and explain the possibilities you want to discuss, without presenting uncertainty as an established diagnosis.
Next discussion
Identify what needs clarification and the assessment or plan to discuss with your supervisor.
The broad history–examination–investigation–assessment structure is consistent with the BMJ’s teaching guide to presenting patient cases. The exact detail depends on the setting. BMJ: How to present patient cases.
Keep “known”, “not yet checked” and “interpretation” separate
Use three columns on your practice sheet:
- Known: information you have actually gathered or verified.
- Not yet checked: questions, examination components or results still missing.
- Interpretation: your explanation of how the known information fits together.
This simple sorting exercise prevents an empty box from becoming an invented normal finding. Practise saying “I have not established that yet” clearly, then identify how you would clarify it with the team. Do not invent examination findings to make a presentation sound complete.
A fictional example: improve the opening without inventing facts
Practice facts: An adult aged 42 reports two weeks of fatigue, which now interrupts their usual walk to work. The exercise provides no examination, medication history or investigation results. This is an invented teaching scenario, not a real patient or a diagnostic exercise.
Unhelpful opening: “This is a case of anaemia. Everything else is normal.”
More accurate opening: “I am presenting an adult aged 42 with two weeks of fatigue affecting their usual walk to work. I have not yet established the relevant background or examination findings, so I cannot make a supported assessment from this information alone.”
The second version is not a complete presentation. Its strength is that it tells the listener what is known and where the gaps are. Your practice task is to list the missing categories from the template—not to guess a disease from a sentence.
Case presentation is not the same as handover
When communicating a focused concern, a locally adopted tool may be more appropriate than a full case history. AHRQ’s TeamSTEPPS describes SBAR as Situation, Background, Assessment and Recommendation. Its handover guidance also emphasises confirming the transfer of responsibility and the receiver’s understanding. Use the approach your team teaches; a mnemonic alone does not complete a safe handover. AHRQ communication teaching guidance.
A repeatable practice drill
- Choose a fictional teaching case or an authorised, appropriately de-identified learning case.
- Write the seven headings above and add only the information provided.
- Deliver the presentation to a study partner, using a time limit agreed with your teacher.
- Ask your partner to write the main problem and the important uncertainty they heard.
- Compare their summary with yours. Revise the one sentence that caused the most confusion, then try again.
For feedback, focus on organisation, suitable detail, respectful language, the patient’s perspective and how you respond to questions. These are also features assessed in Stanford’s oral-presentation teaching rubric. Stanford feedback rubric.
Do not treat faster delivery as the only improvement. A clearer distinction between a result and an assumption is a useful improvement too.
Protect confidentiality while you practise
Do not put patient names, hospital numbers, photographs or identifiable records in personal study files or public tools. Use fictional examples for independent rehearsal, and follow your institution’s rules for any real-case learning. The CDIM primer highlights confidentiality and appropriate access to patient records. CDIM professional expectations.
Continue your practice
For separate timed-station practice, see our OSCE checklists. To explore the format of our study material, preview the free sample notes. Neither a checklist nor a notes bundle replaces supervised clinical training.
How this article was prepared: AI-assisted educational writing based on the teaching resources linked above, with original practice prompts and a fictional example. Sources checked on 26 October 2026. No independent clinician review or endorsement by the cited institutions is claimed.