attending rounds

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kocker

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just out of curiosity:

how common is it for you guys to round with your attendings?

At my school, I only see the attendings round with the students one morning a week at that is only when they are available.

is this the norm?
 
just out of curiosity:

how common is it for you guys to round with your attendings?

At my school, I only see the attendings round with the students one morning a week at that is only when they are available.

is this the norm?
I saw it all the time... but that was on television. Otherwise, I only saw it in medical school on the medicine service. It is quite interesting how so numerous the attendings pine away about the good old days and old school.... but they do so very little of what the tell us about their experiences under their mentors.

JAD
 
formal socratic mass teaching rounds- rare. maybe happens most on trauma/critical care service since they tend to have more free time. or at least fewer elective cases/clinic to dedicate time to round in sicu, and a dedicated sicu doc

on the avg busy gen surg service- rounds occur but not always in the traditional manner. esp in private practice: there are the rigors of clinic, elective cases and paperwork. to spend 90 minutes of continous rounding may not be feasible. in my old program, one of the staff liked to round early so he could meet the obligations of office (offcampus) and ironically, the residents complained! that they had to get in too early.

"rounds" means different things to different people at different levels. it can mean as little as a brief conversation with an attending about a patient. dont discount these brief interactions as non teaching. most surgeons will have to round on a few patients at a time in between cases or office visits and it just isnt practical to assemble the whole team.
 
For us it only happened on the relatively "non-op" services of trauma and SICU. Transplant also used to do attendings rounds in the afternoon, after the cases were done. Students were expected to attend rounds on those services.

Most other services had attendings who would do "run rounds" with the Chief between cases. Occasionally they would grab an intern to round with if the Chief was elsewhere doing a case. We used to have an attending that would like to round around 11 pm at night...avoiding going home to his wife, I suspected.

Not nearly as formal as in IM.
 
I saw it all the time... but that was on television. Otherwise, I only saw it in medical school on the medicine service. It is quite interesting how so numerous the attendings pine away about the good old days and old school.... but they do so very little of what the tell us about their experiences under their mentors.

JAD

So that IS how it used to be....?

In that case, I'm bringing it back.... in 5-10 yrs or so. Clinic be damned.
 
Attending rounds was a major casualty of the 80 hour work week in my institution. There were several attendings who would round every day on all their patients in some detail with the whole team. Not like medicine rounds (thank god) but good teaching. This happened after OR/clinic was done, often 6-8pm range. Didn't fit with the new work hour scheme so it died. Shame.
 
There are attendings here who still do "walk rounds." Our pediatric surgery chief does them once a week. One of our HPB attendings will do it sporadically (usually if clinic is over early). They really are great when they happen, but as Pilot Doc noted, the 80-hour work week pretty much killed them.
 
I did last month. We had 3-4 attendings with patients on the service at any given time, and they'd just page the chief when they wanted to round. I never rounded with one attending, occasionally rounded with two of the others, and always rounded with the one that I was working with closely. He would just do it in between cases or after clinic. They were usually fairly brief, and we were only seeing 4-5 patients with each attending.
 
We usually had formal walk rounds once per week. Other days the chief would just run the list with the attendings and if there was a patient or two they had concerns about go see them quickly between cases.
 
We had daily formal rounds on trauma/sicu. There was one attending who also wanted to round almost daily, which meant being stuck following him around for hours and hours -- this guy has no sense of time management. The senior on the team was pretty much stuck with him, but everyone else tried to do whatever they could do avoid it.
 
I'm finishing the last week of my 2.5 months on our trauma service as the icu resident, and I can count on one hand the number of times any of my attendings have set foot in the icu, other than staffing PEGS, bedside trachs, and such.

We "round" each morning in the call room downstairs where I tell them what's going on, they dictate their notes based on my ICU notes and then they leave. For the most part, they couldn't pick my patients out from a police lineup.

I'm so glad to almost be done. The biggest pain is trying to figure out what ortho and neuro want to do with my patients. I've really come to almost hate them for the pain they bring to my life. Probably 6 of the 22 patients I have to see tomorrow morning are ready for placement (off the vent, not infected, trached and PEG'd), aside from the face that they're still in traction, or have a stinking posterior fusion scheduled for a week from now. It's getting rediculous, but from what I gather standard procedure from those services. 😡
 
I'm so glad to almost be done. The biggest pain is trying to figure out what ortho and neuro want to do with my patients. I've really come to almost hate them for the pain they bring to my life. Probably 6 of the 22 patients I have to see tomorrow morning are ready for placement (off the vent, not infected, trached and PEG'd), aside from the face that they're still in traction, or have a stinking posterior fusion scheduled for a week from now. It's getting rediculous, but from what I gather standard procedure from those services. 😡

Yes, SOP in most places.
 
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