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[msarcher]

So a quick update.  There was that big exam, then there was the 6 weeks on psychiatry.  I worked in a locked unit where many of the patients were confined to a single hospital floor often for a week or more at the discretion of the psychiatrists.

Comments

[rose_garden]

Do they remain locked on that floor if there is a fire alarm?

(That's one of the first things that happened to my mom when she was first locked in a psychiatric ward.)

Where I rotated

[miraling]

There's some kind of incredibly complex procedure that all of the psychiatrists and nurses and social workers and activity therapists and associated other staff know and get quizzed on. The alarm goes off in coded sets of buzzes which they can decipher to figure out where in the hospital the fire alarm has occurred. (I think it's something relatively simple like first set of # = floor number, etc.) Then all of the patients get lined up so we can make sure we have everyone all together in case we need to evacuate. (This is as much as I experienced; the rest is more speculative). If the fire alarm is (I think) on an adjacent floor (or the floor itself, of course) then we (theoretically) all evacuate together.

[miraling]

Um, so, in short, sometimes but not always depending on the situation?

[miraling]

Wow, it sounds like my psychiatry rotation had a lot in common but also some key differences (I think the psychiatrists at the location I rotated went to court fairly regularly, for example). I think the legal and ethical issues are really thorny, but even more I found it difficult to personally handle the quantity of anger that ended up directed at me, even in a peripheral role as a student and not a decision maker in any capacity. I have a lot of respect for the people who deal with that kind of intensity of emotion on a daily basis.