Educational feature:

Hit the right pitch, by Dr Liz Hare

Pitching is an important aspect to be considered in effective teaching. You can lose your audience by being too simple or too complex. The trick is to craft your content so as neither to patronise nor to overwhelm.

Not that making things simple is easy. When addressing medical students, covering a new topic without numbing them with information can mean giving a version of the truth that leaves out a lot of the uncertainties that you hope some of them might research in the future. For your peers, you don’t want to teach them to suck eggs, but a summary of what is current knowledge can get the brain warmed up to take in new information.

We try to get the levels right for CPD Online. Covering familiar ground will help keep your knowledge fresh, while learning new information from our modules and podcasts – even if it is picking up only one or two new ideas – will hopefully be useful and relevant to your work. 

Gender dysphoria

Psychological support has a very important role for individuals with gender concerns, transgenderism and gender dysphoria – from confirming the diagnosis, to managing concurrent mental health issues, to preparing patients for transition to another gender. The module is a comprehensive review of the topic, accompanied by videos of patients' accounts of gender dysphoria and their experience of the real-life process and transition.

Treating depression in later life

Depression is common in later life, with a prevalence of 10-15%. Diagnosis and treatment can be challenging because of the overlap of the condition with physical illness and its interplay with cognitive impairment. Yet, evidence-based treatment produces encouraging outcomes and this is therefore a rewarding field to be involved in. This module gives a rounded perspective of the condition, with an emphasis on treatment.