The psychiatry schedule

My psychiatry rotation at the VA is by far the most relaxed schedule I've had in my third year. I get in before 8am so I have enough time to read notes on my patients from the day before. No pre-rounds and no rounds. We have a brief meeting with the social workers at 8am, then table rounds with nurses afterward.

After rounds, the daily schedule is remarkably unstructured. Sometimes we have a new patient and do the intake interview together as a group. Usually, though, we medical students are left to our own devices. I use the time to go talk with my patients, take care of patient-related tasks, and write notes. I actually have a lot of fun writing psychiatry notes, probably because we're expected to be verbose and because the subjective portion of the note is simply recounting a conversation, most of which are rather interesting.

Writing notes usually takes me until early to mid afternoon, depending on whether we admitted a new patient or not. Both my attending and residents have repeated that we should go home when we're finished with our clinical duties, but both my classmates and I tend to stick around until 5-6pm, studying Psychiatry Case Files together, until the residents call it a night.

Part of the reason I finish so early is because I'm only carrying two patients. This is due to unfortunate timing of construction that necessitated closing one of the two psychiatry floors, truncating the bed count from 36 down to 22. That means fewer patients for everybody.

We don't work weekends. On top of that, there are two national holidays (New Year's and MLK Day) during this rotation, which the VA hospital patriotically observes by closing. All of this means that my psychiatry experience is more limited than I would have liked.