Self-Assessment Guide (Patient Version)

My personal mission is for people to experience more effective and efficient emotional health care. I've been an acute care psychiatrist for over 20 years. I've been a training director of a psychiatric residency program for 9. I'm still a co-director of the UT medical school clerkship program for psychiatry and I've been a medical director for 13 years. I've also been blessed to practice in a voluntary inpatient unit with great people and my patients are happy and satisfied, but I hear stories every day about how dissatisfied those same patients were in other places. I've asked myself why that might be and have come up with a series of things that I believe are central to better care. The first, and the subject of this course, is a careful, compassionate and comprehensive assessment. This doesn't just apply to hospitalizations. Anytime that a provider comes in first contact with a patient or client there is an overwhelming amount of information to gather and organize. There is also trust and a relationship to build. The person receiving care has an overwhelming amount of personal data to be shared with the provider. There is often a need to organize one's own complaints to even know what to work on first, and often, layers and layers of hurt, pain, sometimes anger, addiction, etc. that might require more thought and reflection than is typically possible within the relatively short time the provider has to spend. It's no wonder that this is a complicated, time consuming and sometimes frustrating process! I also know people who spend weeks to months waiting on that first appointment. People might even spend days in emergency rooms waiting for acute care beds so why not make better use of that time!

When I finally get to sit down with a person for the first time, I need to take about an hour asking a fairly standard series of questions to feel like I've done a full evaluation. Some of those questions are safety based and not particularly engaging for the person I'm serving and honestly, probably are not very curative. Eventually, (often the second visit) we move on to teaching, therapeutic and the pharmacologic management that proves most helpful for getting people better quickly but why wait? You often have time and if I (or any other provider out there) have the evaluation and documentation done, we can jump right into effective treatment! This will save you tons of time, frustration and cost! Ready?