Welcome to the Clinical Scenarios

These ~190 clinical scenarios collectively contain learning points that cover the entire medical curriculum. Use any of these multidisciplinary scenarios for your learning and teaching - just pick out the learning points you want to focus on, and revisit the scenario to look at different aspects in the spiral of learning through the years of the medical programme.

There are strong connections between the scenarios and progress testing. All questions in Progress Tests link to scenario learning points, and these links are provided in Progress Test feedback. Many of the learning points have hyperlinks within them to take you to relevant information (mainly in-house resources). Progress Test-type questions (with answer and commentary) are being added to scenarios for practice and further learning – look for links to these immediately below the scenario Description.

Click on the Scenarios link in the menu above to see a list of the scenarios.

Click on the Diagnoses link to see a list of the diagnoses in the 'Conditions to be considered related to this scenario' for each scenario.

Click on the Medicines link to see a list of the core medicines associated with scenarios, view which of these are expected to be prescribed competently in Year 6 and follow links to the New Zealand Formulary.

Click on the Learning Points link to see a list of the learning points and the scenarios associated with them. Here, and within each scenario, you can choose to view the learning points that are most relevant to Phase 1.

Click on the Glossary link to see how terms have been used in the learning points.


Scenarios, Diagnoses, Medicines and Learning Points can be searched using a variety of criteria. When displaying scenarios by Clinical Discipline/Organ System, the degree of relevance of that Clinical Discipline/Organ System to each scenario is indicated. The selected scenarios are those with special relevance, but there may be additional scenarios that contain learning points pertinent to the Clinical Discipline/Organ System. A search using Text should find these. Scenarios can also be displayed by Progress Test Topic. (These topics are from the Professional and Linguistic Assessments Board (PLAB) test used in the United Kingdom, and allow us to benchmark performance).

For each scenario, learning points that are particularly important have been selected. To keep the scenarios reasonably succinct, they do not include every learning point that might be relevant. However, across the entire set of scenarios, the intention is that all key learning points in the curriculum will be represented somewhere.

Age, gender and ethnicity are stated, but the clinical presentation can be considered for a range of patient characteristics.

Conditions to be considered relating to the scenario are listed after the domain entries. They are grouped as 'Common', 'Less Common but "Important Not to Miss"' and 'Uncommon' and within groups the order is roughly equivalent to the degree of relevance.

Links to 'Related Scenarios' and 'Resources' are provided.

Feedback on the clinical scenarios is welcomed and can be submitted by clicking on the Feedback link above. It is intended that there will be continual improvement of the scenarios.


Note to External Users: This clinical scenario database is 'open access'. While we welcome use by others, we would like to know how they are used for teaching and learning outside the University of Auckland, who is using them, what you have found to be particularly helpful and what might be improved. We therefore ask that you provide us with a brief description of this by completing information in Feedback. We also request that you appropriately acknowledge the use of this database. Thank you.