How to give a good oral presentation
Definitions & Key takeaways
There is no surefire recipe for giving an excellent oral presentation, but some general tips can help. First, make sure you know your topic inside and out. Not only will this help you feel more confident when speaking, but it will also make it easier to answer questions from audience members. Second, be aware of your body language and try to appear relaxed and confident. Make eye contact with your audience and use gestures to emphasize your points. And finally, stay calm and focused during the presentation. Breathe deeply and try to keep your voice steady. If you make a mistake, don't dwell on it - just move on. By following these tips, you can give a great oral presentation that will engage and inform your audience.
Hey guys, Doctor Desi here from osmosis. I'm the Chief medical officer and it's great to see you guys again.
I'm uh excited today. We're gonna talk about something that's uh pretty important to me.
Uh I say pretty important actually, as I think about it, it's actually extremely important. It's how people present themselves through oral communications.
So how you're actually um sharing a case, how you're describing a patient either to um another physician, a nurse, maybe someone in the healthcare team.
Um But also how you think about uh patients as well. So I'm gonna give you three tips on how I think you can do uh a really stellar job with your oral presentations uh as you go, go through uh your clinical practice.
So, uh before I get started, I wanna remind you, uh it's really important to me that you like this uh video that you also leave a comment on a tip that you think is important uh in terms of how to give a go good oral presentations.
So my first tip, I have three, my first one is set expectations with the one liner, again, set expectations with your one liner So what's the one liner?
Well, that's like where you basically take an entire story and try to extract out the bits that you think are most relevant per person to, to hear.
So I'm gonna give you some examples. The first example is a three year old with cough and fever for four days.
And what you wanna do with that one liner is you wanna provoke some thoughts, right? So if I say uh a three year old with cough and fever for four days, what sort of thoughts should be jumping in your head?
You know, for me as a pediatric infectious disease doctor, I think, oh, viral pneumonia, like that's the most common thing in a three year old that's had cough and fever for four days.
What if I changed it to three year old with coughing fever for four weeks? So all I've changed is instead a three day or four days.
It's four weeks. Well, now I'm thinking, no, this is not a viral pneumonia.
This is more likely to be what maybe pertussis, maybe it's uh a tuberculosis, maybe it's a really bad bacterial pneumonia, maybe it's uh foreign body aspiration, you know, anything like that would last for much longer.
And so again, you know, just changing that four days to four weeks, really dramatically changes what I'm thinking. And so what, what I want with your one liner is to kind of set expectations for the kinds of things people should be thinking about in their heads.
Let me give you another example. And this is across time.
So instead of like the initial presentation, let's say I give a one liner, uh maybe a little bit later. So here's another one, a three year old with a right middle lobe pneumonia on Antibiotic Day four of seven.
Well, now you say, ok, this is not something that's just coming in. This is someone that's already been admitted.
So they're probably pretty sick and then they had a right middle lobe pneumonia. So presumably they had a chest X ray or chest CT and they're on antibiotics.
So we think it's bacterial and they're on day four of seven. So I'm guessing they may be over the worst of it, maybe the first three days really bad.
And hopefully, as I go to see this patient, they're kind of on the mend, maybe getting a little bit better. I would hope I may still having fevers, but hopefully not as high.
I would assume I'm ready to see a patient that's maybe getting better but was pretty sick. Now, what about this?
Right? A three year old status post, right, middle of pneumonia three weeks ago here for follow up.
Now, that's a different one liner I'm expecting. Ok, this patient is totally well, should be really happy.
Uh I'm guessing they're outpatient and, um, I'm hoping that there are no residual symptoms that they're totally fine back to school.
Eating well. Mom thinks that they're doing great.
Dad thinks that they're doing great, you know, that sort of story. So that's what you do with your one liner.
Again. Your, the the first step is set expectations with the one liner.
Make sure that the person's thinking what you want them to think in terms of what the patient is doing. Number two, present a story, you know, tip number two for an oral presentation, you wanna present a story.
The first one was set expectations with your one liner. But then if you're gonna a double click and someone's like, no, tell me the whole story, tell me what's going on present this case.
Then you wanna make sure you tell it as a story, meaning use chronology, use time order and make sure it flows naturally that there's cause and then effect.
So I'm gonna give you a quick example and, and I'm not gonna tell you the diagnosis. A 55 year old man who started noticing intermittent episodes of knee pain.
Starting about a year ago. The episodes were happening about every month or so and each one was excruciatingly painful, making it really hard to sleep, even leaving a bedsheet on the knee made the pain worse.
They were triggered by sitting for long periods of time and especially when he was dehydrated and not drinking a lot of water.
The pain was triggered by certain foods like eating meat and would improve when he ate lots of vegetables and fruits, particularly cherries.
The pain would last for a few days and would slowly improve day by day. So what does that diagnosis sound like to you?
Understanding that this is a story, I'm telling a narrative. I'm telling it from the patient's perspective.
There are certain features II throw in that, right? Like it improves with cherries.
Uh He's dehydrated, it's excruciatingly painful. Even having a bed sheet was really painful.
So you really get a good sense of kind of the the extremist and the and the pain that this person is feeling and that it's happening kind of recurrently.
It's in bouts, it comes and it goes lasting a few days at a time, but it's been lasting for about a year. So those are all key pieces to figure out what's going on.
But again, you wanna tell it as a story, you'll want pieces to kind of jumbled around and out of place. Number three, this is something I rarely, rarely ever hear, but remember the end of the story.
So what I mean by that is a lot of times people tell the story, but then they don't usually take the time to kind of look it up, look up how things ended.
So for example, uh how is that patient doing that was in critical care? You know, a month later, two months later, uh are they doing well?
Are they back to school? Are they healthy?
Are they happy? Are they having ongoing, you know, psychiatric problems?
Are they having ongoing uh challenges readjusting to, to their life at home? Uh What is it like in terms of stigma?
Maybe it's a patient that had a, a stoma, you know, is it weird having that? Are they having trouble making friends all those things as a person readjust to their life back home?
As a medical student, you oftentimes uh or even as a resident think about people just acutely, you know, as they get sick.
But of course, these people reenter society reenter their life. And in terms of oral presentations, I can't tell you how valuable it is to me when a med student or resident says, hey, you know what, I followed up on that patient that we discharged a month ago and I just called them at home and they're doing really well or I saw them in clinic again and they actually got readmitted for whatever.
You know, to me, that's the last part of the story. And I know in oral presentations, we usually don't uh uh think of that.
We just say, OK, what is, what's happened, what happened and then what's happening now. But, but there is a third part of the story, which is the end of the story.
So I want you to kind of remember that and, and do due diligence and look that part up because it'll help you as a physician to make sure you understand the full arc of what happens to people.
And so that the next patient you see that has, you know that story I presented was gout that has terrible gout. You can say, you know what?
Actually, long term did very well, Didn't have any problems. Uh That could be true for you as well.
So II really encourage you again. The three, the three tips, set expectations with your one liner, present a story when you're presenting orally and then go back and look things up and then share that story with people.
Let people know, oh, that patient ended up doing really well or that patient ended up getting readmitted so that people understand the end of the story as well.
And that's important. I'd love to see what comments and tips you have.
Take care guys. Bye-bye, start your free trial today at osmosis.org.
No notes for this video yet
Try adding a note below