Something Old, Something New
It’s Sunday. I just got home from a long day on call in the CPEP (psychiatric emergency department). I continue to love my job. Also, I’ve developed an interesting skill by working in the CPEP.
I just realized that this topic will make for a good post on Medscape, but I thought I’d share a quick preview here. Basically, my job in the psych ED is to determine what we call “disposition.” I’m tasked with evaluating a patient and determining one of three paths for them. They are either:
1. Safe/sane/well enough to be discharged.
2. Unsafe/mentally ill/sick enough to be admitted as an inpatient.
3. Somewhere in between and need to stay for 1-3 days for further observation.
The skill, which I’ve developed, is being able to determine their disposition in anywhere from 1 second to around 15 minutes. I evaluated four patients today. I was able to determine each of their dispositions within 1 – 3 seconds. Wait, that’s not fair, you may say! But it is actually not as challenging as you might think. And it does involve a bit of “profiling.” This shall be the topic of my Medscape post this week.
Anyway, tomorrow I start a brand new rotation in out-patient medicine. Except this rotation will be “medical” medicine patients, instead of “psychiatric” medicine patients, like my last rotation.
Here’s to something old, something awesome, and something new!
Photo: Taken during my awesome run yesterday. The “Arch” on the Manhattan side of the Manhattan Bridge.