What's your outpatient year caseload?

[st2205]

Reading through the LSU thread and someone mentioned they average around 30 new patients per month. I'm curious what everyone's load is because my next follow-up appointment isn't until January and there are many days where I'll pick up at least 4-5 new patients in a day and the odds of those people not needing follow up for 3 months is rather low. For patients that need to be seen, I'm having to book people over therapy or supervision times. What's your typical load and new patients per week/month?

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[DD214_DOC]

Total pts I think that's about right, but a good chunk of them will be lost to follow-up or never come back after the intake.

Get used to it. My first month out of training and my panel is almost 500 already.

 

[Doctor Bagel]

It's hard to say for my training program because we had so many different sites that we rotated at during 3rd and 4th year. Overall though I'd say we were probably pretty low volume -- definitely lower than what you're describing. Here's a general breakdown --

university outpatient clinic 0.5 to 2 days/week depending on year/electives: most of my patients were weekly long term people -- I'd see maybe 3 to 4 patients in a half day with a new intake maybe every few months. Mostly hourly sessions. We did have a consult clinic pgy4 year where we did a new consult each half day.

VA outpatient clinic: 0.5 day/week pgy 3 and pgy 4 year. No more than one need intake in a half day and maybe just a new intake once a month or so. A normal day might be 3 med management follow ups + one hour long session with a long term patient.

VA medicine consult outpatient clinic: one half day for half of third year -- generally two new intakes and maybe 6 or so follow ups in a day.

VA addiction clinic: ideally similar to above but lots of no shows. We did that for one day for half of third year.

College mental health clinic: one half day for a year. Maybe 6 to 8 patients in a day with no more than 2 intakes.

When I started looking at outpatient jobs, I realized how low volume we were. Honestly I don't think it was a bad thing, especially if you like getting the opportunity to do long term psychodynamic work (well as long of a term as you can do a trainee).

 

[notlucid]

Have you seen 500 patients in one month already or you inherited a panel. In my experience takes 3 to 6 months to build a panel of 500. My new patients were around 3 to 5 per day.Inheriting a panel is different from completely new patients.

 

[splik]

Reading through the LSU thread and someone mentioned they average around 30 new patients per month. I'm curious what everyone's load is because my next follow-up appointment isn't until January and there are many days where I'll pick up at least 4-5 new patients in a day and the odds of those people not needing follow up for 3 months is rather low. For patients that need to be seen, I'm having to book people over therapy or supervision times. What's your typical load and new patients per week/month?

you need to start blocking your schedule and limiting the number of new patients. Seeing 4-5 news is fine in july and august when you're building up, it's not acceptable at this point. You need to be able to provide good care. Are these totally new patients, or new to you (there is of course a big difference). I think it is way too much to have 4-5 brand new patients at this time. Presumably you will need to be charting when you see the patients. Do you get any administrative time for chart-review, documentation, collateral, prior-auths etc? You should also block some slots so you can see patients urgently if need be. It is unacceptable to be booking people over therapy or supervision - that's bad for your poor patients, and it's bad for your training. Don't let the clinic administrators bully you into taking all these patients and if it's your attendings doing so shame on them

 

[peppy]

4-5 new patients a day sounds like a lot to me for a trainee, assuming you also have follow ups to see too. In my busiest outpatient clinic, we would have at most 2-3 new patients and 10 follow ups in a day. If you're missing out on supervision time because you're busy seeing patients then I think that your program has crossed the line from trying to educate you to using you to move the meat.

 

[F0nzie]

In our 3rd year we inherited 50 patients. Around 25% of the patients needed to be closed or did not want to start with a new psychiatrist. We had 2 intakes per week. It started to get overwhelming at around the 6 month mark.