Clinical Case Presentation

About this template

Built for a short slot

Eight slides is sized for a departmental case conference, an eight-minute oral session or a resident journal club – a slot of ten minutes or less. For a 30-minute lecture or a protocol review you will have to duplicate body slides.

How the eight slides are laid out

Cover, agenda, divider 01, body, before/after comparison, key figures, trend, closing. Slide 2 lists case summary, admission versus discharge, key figures and trend analysis, each with a progress marker in the form “- 01 / 04”, and all four have a slide behind them, so the agenda and the body do not contradict each other. What is short is depth: the file holds one divider-plus-body pair only, titled Case summary, so slide 4 is the only place to write prose. Covering history, findings, differential diagnosis, clinical course and literature review one slide each means duplicating slides 3 and 4 four more times, which brings the deck to 16 slides and forces you to add agenda lines and change the “04” denominators to 08. If you really have eight minutes, do the opposite: keep the single body pair and handle the rest verbally.

Swapping the three body lines for your patient

Slide 4 ships with “68-year-old man, fever three days before admission”, “hypertension, on medication for 15 years”, “30 pack-year smoking history”, numbered 01, 02, 03. The order is demographics and reason for presentation, comorbidity, risk factor, so put your own values in the same slots – e.g. 62-year-old man with three weeks of right upper quadrant pain; e.g. diabetes for 8 years, on metformin; e.g. alcohol four times a week, no family history of gallbladder disease. The cover has separate fields for category, format and year – put your department and presentation date there so handouts carry their source, and remember the same presenter line appears again on the closing slide.

The four figures and the course chart

Slide 6 holds age 68, temperature 38.9 C on arrival, white cell count 18,400 and a five-day stay. All four are already values that come from a single patient, so only the numbers need changing – but 18,400 carries no unit or reference range, so add both to the label. Slide 7 falls from 142 on the day of admission to 98 on day 1, 44 on day 3 and 13 at discharge, marked only as an index. It is built for a value where falling means improvement, such as CRP or a pain score, so replace the index with the real unit and add the upper limit of normal. The bars are shapes, so changing a value does not change the length.

Mistakes that come up in case presentations

• Leaving patient identifiers in imaging captures – crop them out rather than covering them with a shape.
• Pasting a whole lab table; there is no table slide here, so keep three abnormal values and say the rest aloud.
• Adding your own figures next to the sample vitals on slide 5 (38.9C and CRP 14.2 on admission, 36.6C and 0.8 at discharge) instead of overwriting them. Two sets of numbers on one screen leave the room unsure which patient they are looking at.
• Listing the course with no discussion – if you cannot say in one sentence why the case is worth reporting, that is where questions start.