How To Arrange Your Thoughts (or Classify or Die Part 2)

Time is running away fast now, with 12 days until viva week, so I need some help brushing up my skills as well as my knowledge.

When giving an oral presentation or answering a viva voce question, it's important to appear organised with your thoughts. (See Classify Or Die part 1)
To that end, here are some suggestions as to how one should organise these thoughts:

• At medical school we are taught: History of Presenting Complaint, Past Medical History, Drug History, Social History, Examination, Investigations. It still applies that we do them in that order (well, obviously we know that's not always true, but you should do First Things First).

• Pre-/peri-/post-operative management (includes history taking and examination)

• "The problems of anaesthetising/associated with disease x can be divided into patient factors, surgical factors and anaesthetic factors (order these by which ones you want to talk about first, or which ones are the most important)

• "Complications of performing procedure y can be divided into immediate, early and late"

• When presenting an answer to "How would you anaesthetise this 63y old obese patient with a BMI of 44 and a history of aortic stenosis for a total knee replacement?", talk about the underlying principles (maintain SVR, maintain preload, avoid rhythm disturbances etc... ). The same is true for any of the other questions which could come up. It is important that they know what you are worried about. It's important that you know what you are worried about too...

• Be concise and try to be precise. If you mean a vasopressor, don't say "inotrope".

• Remember:

• Blood Pressure = Cardiac Output x SVR
  
• Cardiac Output = Stroke Volume x Heart Rate
• Therefore Blood Pressure = SV x HR x SVR
• Stroke Volume is dependent on contractility, preload and afterload
• Heart rate is a function of rhythm.

James has some other tips.