Includes bibliographical references and index.

"Excellence in clinical practice is not just about good knowledge, skills and behaviours. As fellow author Pat Croskerry points out, how doctors think, reason, and make decisions is arguably their most critical skill. While medical schools and postgraduate training programmes teach and assess the knowledge and skills required to practice as a doctor, few currently offer comprehensive training in clinical reasoning and decision making. This matters because studies show that diagnostic error is common and results in significant harm to patients, and the majority of the root causes of diagnostic error involve errors in clinical reasoning. Clinical reasoning is complex and takes years to learn. Most of the time it is learned implicitly and in an ad hoc fashion. In this book, we have made it explicit, broken down in to its core components. This book is designed to be an introduction for individuals and also an up-to-date resource for teachers and curriculum planners. Each chapter describes a component of clinical reasoning and its applications for clinical practice, teaching and learning. This second edition has been extensively re-written and updated, and key references and further resources have been included for readers who want to explore topics in more detail. Clinical reasoning is relevant to every clinical specialty in every setting, and it is not confined to medical students and doctors - we have written this book with advanced clinical practitioners and other clinicians in mind as well. We hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed re-writing and editing it"-- Provided by publisher.