Presenting cases in front of patients: implications for a key medical education genre

Case presentations have been researched as both an important form of intra/inter-professional communication, where a patient’s clinical information is shared among health professionals involved in their care, and an equally key discursive tool in education, where learners independently assess a patient and present the case to their preceptor and/or care team. But what happens to the case presentation, a genre that governs physician (and learner) talk about patients, when it is used in patients’ presence? While they were commonly used at the bedside in the past, case presentations today are more commonly performed in hallways or conference rooms, out of patient earshot. This paper draws on interview data from a study involving patient-present case presentations in a medical education setting. Our analysis asks what participants’ metageneric comments about the encounter can teach us about the genre, about patient involvement in medical education, and about linguistic adaptations to the genre that the profession might make to support patient involvement.