The COVID-19 pandemic has created unprecedented high demand on our healthcare system: particularly in emergency, medical and intensive care departments. These departments require more staff to meet the needs of the increased patient numbers we are already seeing. To respond to this, secondary care organisations have redeployed staff to work in areas outside of their usual practice.
For healthcare workers and clinicians who have not worked in emergency or medicine departments for some time, this section aims to provide a refresher of the basic clinical skills required when seeing a general medical patient.