Medicine · History

Sudden severe headache at the gym - Emergency Department

HardYear 5 · Curtin style · 10 min + 2 min reading · 4 tasks

2 min reading · 10 min station · reminders at 2 min

Station - Instructions for candidate

You are an intern working in the Emergency Department of a metropolitan hospital in Perth. It is 8 am.

Achol Deng, 44, has driven herself in from the gym with a severe headache that came on about an hour ago.

Your tasks are to:

  1. Take a focused history.
  2. Request any relevant investigations and interpret the results provided.
  3. State your most likely diagnosis and differential diagnoses to the examiner.
  4. Outline your immediate management plan to the examiner.
  • You do NOT need to examine the patient; the examiner will give you the neurological findings if you ask for them.

This is a 10-minute station, with 2 minutes of reading time.

Ask the examiner

Say what you would examine or request, the way you would in the station. Nothing is named until you ask for it.

Whatever the examiner recognises is revealed below. Or pick a numbered item to reveal it blind.

Investigations

Ask for a category the way you would in the station: “Can I have the obs and a set of bloods?”

Examination

Say what you would examine and how; the examiner reports what you would find.

After treatment

Once you have acted, ask how the patient has responded.