The Clinical Vignette: Know the Value and Limitations of This Learning Tool

What Is a Clinical Vignette?

Clinical vignettes are part story, part learning opportunity. They allow a person to either illustrate a specific experience related to the care of a client or to create an example experience. Their purpose is to help readers recognize a treatment, technique, or diagnostic criteria to aid them in their clinical practice.

Humans and the conditions that can happen to them are so complex that as a clinician, you could practice for 100 years and never see all the conditions that can occur in your chosen field. Vignettes help to add experience to your knowledge base that you may not see with your own eyes but that you can learn from others.

As a clinician, you can read bullet points of common symptoms of a condition or a set of evidence-based practice guidelines. Clinical vignettes take these recommendations one step further by allowing a person to see how they are incorporated into real-life situations.

Example of a Clinical Vignette

Several reasons exist why a researcher or clinician may write a clinical vignette.

These include:

• To describe or illustrate a rare condition
• To describe an unusual presentation of a condition
• To suggest a more cost-effective method for managing a medical condition
• To illustrate unknown complications of diagnosis or treatment of a medical condition
• To describe a new phenomenon or condition

The format of a clinical vignette depends upon the journal or other publication where a person submits the vignette. The sequence may include a client’s medical history, examination results, patient treatments or interventions, and the treatment outcomes. Another key aspect of a clinical vignette is the teaching points or discussion sections that are usually at the end of each vignette. The teaching points summarize what a person learns as they read a clinical vignette. These are the key takeaways you can utilize in your practice moving forward.

What Are the Limitations of a Clinical Vignette?

Clinical vignettes can be very useful in medicine, but they are not without their limitations, the main one being that they do not present a fully dimensional image of the client. When you read the vignette, you start to craft the patient in your head. You fill in details that are inevitably missing, such as the client’s appearance, mannerisms, or other symptoms. While this presents a clearer picture to you, whether or not it’s the correct picture is another story.

Overcoming These Limitations

As with many aspects of medicine, it’s important to remember your own clinical biases when you review a clinical vignette. Instead of trying to turn a vignette into something you’ve seen before or have experience with, consider new ways and interpretations of reading a vignette. This will help you overcome its limitations.

Other workarounds exist that can help you overcome limitations. This includes adding another dimension to learning: video. Observing a video clinical vignette can remove some of the interpretive elements that are limiting. You create less of a picture in your head because the video allows you to view the person and their responses.

Video can increase a clinical vignette’s complexity. In a research study published in the journal Academic Medicine, increasing vignette complexity helps to enhance the teaching value of a clinical vignette.

Symptom Media combines researched information with video content to overcome the limitations of traditional clinical vignettes. Click here to access our CE Course Collection and video vignette library comprised of over 600 DSM-5-TR and ICD-10 guided case studies to start learning and advancing your clinical practice.