What healthcare students do with what they don't know: The socializing power of ‘uncertainty’ in the case presentation

Healthcare students learn to manage clinical uncertainty amid the tensions that emerge between clinical omniscience and the ‘truth for now’ realities of the knowledge explosion in healthcare. The case presentation provides a portal to viewing the practitioner's ability to manage uncertainty. We examined the communicative features of uncertainty in 31 novice optometry case presentations and considered how these features contributed to the development of professional identity in optometry students. We also reflected on how these features compared with our earlier study of medical students' case presentations. Optometry students, like their counterparts in medicine, displayed a that focused on personal deficits in knowledge. While optometry and medical students shared aspects of this rhetoric ( ), optometry students displayed instances of while medical students displayed instances of . We found that the nature of this novice rhetoric was shaped by professional identity (a tendency to ) and the clinical setting (inpatient versus outpatient settings). More explicit discussions regarding uncertainty may help the novice unlock the code of contextual forces that cue the savvy member of the community to sanctioned discursive strategies.