I don't think that psychiatrists need to perform psychotherapy, and I think there is certainly room for "team leader" physicians who handle larger patient volumes by properly utilizing the skillsets of the interdisciplinary team. No doubt, if you have a psychologist, social worker, nurses, health techs etc. on the team a lot of the therapeutic work can happen without your direct involvement. Still, you will need to do more than just tweak medication doses. You need to, for example:
-do careful diagnostic work, including reviewing charts and collateral (even if someone else gathers it),
-spend enough time to make some connection with the patient, because while therapy is optional building some degree of rapport is essential,
-perform risk evaluations,
-give direction to your team and participate in interdisciplinary discussions,
-talk with outpatient physicians (occasionally), and physician consultants (occasionally),
-be available for a range of urgent issues.
This means you don't need to spend time sitting for therapy, but you don't want to dive in too deep and have to discard many of the above functions because you don't have the time. I think those are part of the job. If you are particularly efficient and can manage all of the above in less time than average, that's totally fine! I don't believe, though, that anyone is efficient enough to handle multiple 50-patient units that way. I think the quality of care would have to suffer.
