Clinical Skills Evaluation Psychiatry: Fill & Download for Free

If you go to your family doctor with a sore throat and ask for something to help with it, you've demonstrated the basic criteria for capacity to give consent: you know something is wrong, you think the doctor can treat it, and you ask them to do so.Details, such as your history of medical conditions, allergies, other meds, etc, can be discussed once your capacity is clear. The doctor can say “Test’s positive for strep, here's a prescription that should clear it up.”If you come in obviously confused you could still say “I don't feel good, help me.” and that would cover an examination, management of urgent problems such as bleeding or dehydration, basic labs, admission to the Emergency Department or hospital.If it turns out you need surgery or a more potentially risky treatment, the doctor will try to find your partner or next of kin and get their approval also. If you need surgery for a life-threatening emergency and are unconscious or can't seem to understand what's happening, the doctor can get an emergency court order authorizing the treatment if no next of kin can be found.It gets more complicated when the procedure or treatment carries risk and the illness is serious. The patient needs to know what is possibly present, what treatment is possible, likely complications, what long-term consequences could happen, and what is likely to happen if nothing is done.We should explain all this in very simple terms as well as more complex and specific ones, asking the patient to tell us what their understanding is as we do so. Understanding and processing information is not the same for all people, so this evaluation will be directed to the individual.If the doctor is uncertain about the patient’s understanding, they might choose to have a second assessment done also. As a specialist in psychiatry, I have been asked to help with questions like this more than once.It's one of the oldest clinical skills known: ask, explain, listen.

That not enough people avail themselves of our services.We are physicians who have specialized in a field of medicine that strives to identify, evaluate, and help provide care and treatment for those people who suffer from psychiatric disorders.We are the clinicians who have the full array of diagnostic categories in our training, and have the skills and training to both rule out many medical illnesses that mimic psychiatric ones, as well as diagnose the full array of disorders.We have excellent, effective and meaningful treatments, and not enough people take full advantage of these treatments, especially in the opioid and alcohol addiction realms.We don’t do procedures, we don’t have lab tests to diagnose, we rely on our clinical evaluation of a face to face interview with the patient.Having had a private practice of psychiatry for well over thirty years, and hopefully many more, I see first hand every day the value of what I do. It’s not about me, it’s the process of what I was trained to do, and the technology we have available to us.I wish more of my colleagues spent more time with their patients, and more patients would have the ability to receive the quality care that is out there.

Absolutely not.Truth is, when I practiced psychiatry (and I took pride in my diagnostic skills), I never made a diagnosis from any assessment that wasn’t my own (including some terrifically sensitive and in-depth psychological tests given by talented and careful psychologists).A very experienced and terrific physician taught me very early on in my medical training to see patients in person. I can still recall vividly many of those patients. I’ve learned over the years that nothing substitutes for an in-person clinical assessment. No matter how busy, how tired, how much I needed to get home I always saw patients in person. I can’t tell you the number of times I heard information over the phone from another treater or read a report or consult and later saw the patient in person and observed some sign or elicited a symptom that was critical to a diagnosis.So, medical students, interns, residents: nothing substitutes for seeing a patient in person.Online evaluations are, maybe, a little better than horoscopes.