Training medical students to develop the skills for establishing clinical diagnosis

In the field of medicine, it is extremely important to establish a correct and timely diagnosis to ensure delivery of appropriate quality assured care, maintain patient safety, and minimize hospital-induced errors. An extensive search of all materials related to the topic was carried out in the PubMed search engine and a total of 6 articles were selected based on the suitability with the current review objectives and analyzed. There are no doubts that the process of making a precise clinical diagnosis is a complex one and is error prone. Amid these facts, it is a real challenge for the medical teachers to teach and train the medical students with an aim to accomplish the core competency of reaching a correct clinical diagnosis in authentic settings. One of the approaches adopted by the teachers is to provide learning opportunities to the students so that they can develop critical thinking and clinical reasoning skills. In conclusion, medical teachers have to adopt a systematic approach for teaching students the skill of establishing a clinical diagnosis in authentic settings. It is essential that the training should start from the early years and should be implemented in such a way that students get a number of learning opportunities in real settings to be more useful.