Empowering undergraduate medical students with clinical reasoning skills

ABSTRACT Healthcare professionals are expected to accurately diagnose and manage a wide range of complex cases in their clinical practice, and while doing so, they must take strict precautions to avoid misdiagnoses and incorrect management of patients. This essentially calls for the need to develop clinical reasoning skills that improve the ability to gather and interpret attributes of patients, analyze the clinical findings, and thereby make informed decisions regarding the management of individual patients. The objectives of the current article are to identify the necessity to train medical students in clinical reasoning skills, enumerate the common methods for teaching and assessing clinical reasoning skills, identify the challenges involved in teaching and assessing clinical reasoning, and propose targeted strategies to overcome these identified challenges. A combination of teaching–learning methodologies can be tried to train medical students in clinical reasoning skills. The process of training medical students in clinical reasoning skills has its share of concerns that must be overcome. In conclusion, clinical reasoning skills are crucial to making correct diagnoses and facilitating evidence-based decisions about patient management. The need of the hour is to expose medical students to a combination of pedagogical approaches and supplement them with assessment methods to streamline the process of development of clinical reasoning skills.