When you see outpatients and prescribe meds the process is pretty easy—you talk to your patient, discuss some options, then prescribe. Your patient picks up the prescription at the pharmacy and you see how things went during your next appointment. On the inpatient unit things get more complicated since you and your patient are at the mercy of a hospital system and staff with their schedules and policies. In this fact sheet, we provide some tips to ensure that your patient gets the right meds at the right time.

This fact sheet provides a practical guide for conducting interviews with family members and other informants to better understand your patients. These interviews generally take between 20-40 minutes, depending on the quantity and quality of information being shared.

Hypertension is fairly common in patients admitted to psychiatric units. Causes range from transient anxiety, to substance withdrawal, to cardiovascular issues. Your job as a psychiatric provider is to assess whether there is an urgent situation needing immediate treatment or an issue that can wait for your medical colleagues to do a thorough evaluation and come up with a treatment plan. Occasionally, depending on your training and comfort level, you can also initiate treatment for moderate hypertension, and we suggest an approach should you decide to do so.

As a psychiatrist or provider in an inpatient setting, your primary role is to evaluate and treat patients with acute psychiatric symptoms. Understanding aftercare options enhances collaboration with social workers and improves patient outcomes. This guide provides a systematic overview of common aftercare resources.

Precaution orders help ensure the safety and well-being of patients and staff. Here’s an overview of common precaution orders as well as examples of what they entail in terms of additional monitoring and intervention.

Covering other clinicians’ patients is a fact of life on the inpatient unit. Sometimes such coverage will be arranged well in advance due to a scheduled vacation, but other times your colleague gets sick and can’t come in. Suddenly, you and the other clinicians have to split a patient caseload and you may have several extra patients to see. Don’t panic—just come up with a procedure for efficiently getting to know these new patients quickly via focused interviews and write concise notes. Here are some tips.

Headaches are common in inpatient psychiatry. This guide will help you to distinguish potentially life-threatening headaches from chronic headaches, provide advice on the psychiatric-headache intersection, and discuss treatment options that might address both psychiatric conditions and headaches.

This fact sheet will help enhance your efficiency in conducting new patient evaluations. Developing a consistent approach will help mitigate the apprehension that trainees and early career clinicians often feel when faced with new patient assignments. The goal is for you to anticipate these evaluations with confidence, knowing you will complete them swiftly and proficiently.

Urinary tract infections (UTIs) are common, especially among female patients. In younger patients, an uncomplicated UTI doesn’t normally affect psychiatric symptoms, and you will typically order a urinalysis, initiate antibiotic treatment. In geriatric patients, however, UTIs can cause a variety of psychiatric symptoms, including confusion and agitation. Here we review strategies to diagnose and manage UTIs.

We all know that it’s important to give old records at least a cursory review before admitting new patients (or, depending on when you can get records, within the first few days of admission). But do you have a systematic and efficient method for doing this review? This fact sheet outlines key aspects to focus on when examining past records, especially discharge summaries, to ensure continuity and efficacy of care.