Reading notes every morning - better than a best-selling mystery/adenture novel!

I am now in the depths of my psychiatry rotation in Seattle. It is a great and truly memorable experience! Medical students are divided into teams that round on patients in the hospital fr psychiatric reasons. For the most part, patients are being held against their will for their own safety (either for suicidal thoughts/plans or psychosis or something similar). The teams usually consist of an attending psychiatrist, either a psychiatry resident (psychiatrist in training) or a psychiatry physician's assistant, 1 or 2 medical students, a social worker, a pharmacist, and occasionally a pharmacy student. The teams are generally a lot of fun and are very dedicated to helping patients.

In the morning, the students get there a little before the other members of the team and look up labs, medications and read nursing and other notes from the team's patients from the team before. Then before rounding the medical students can update the team on what is going on with the patients before team interviews the patients each morning. This is a very similar pattern to what happens on other rotations in the third year of medical school. However, what is different about psych is WHAT is written in the notes. On other rotations, the notes usually have the patients blood pressure, heart rate, how much fluid they consumed and how much the urinated, how they slept, how much pain they are in, etc. In summary, overnight notes in other third year rotations are just a touch boring. Occasionally something exciting happens (your patient worsened and might have to be sent to the intensive care unit or something else sad or upsetting), but generally not the most exciting part of your day. Psych notes have a lot of this medical information too, but they also have descriptions of what the patient said or did the previous afternoon and night. By almost every definition, psych notes are almost never boring. In fact, opening up psych notes in the morning was one of the my favorite parts of the day. It was even better than opening up a best selling adventure or thriller book because you never knew what patient might have done over-night.


My pictorial version of psychiatry notes - they are better than an adventure/thriller book or movie. Even more exciting and unexpected.