Who should I call about this patient's recommendations...?

This is a GREAT QUESTION and unfortunately is not easily answered. Despite doing IM residency here and doing lots of consults last year I still have trouble figuring out who's a patient's doctor from time to time. Also, the system changes occasionally so you gotta stay on your toes.

In general, the best way to convey recommendations is to page:

First - the person who paged you. Put the name and pager number of the contact person into the comment section of our ID consult list when they call.

Second - whoever wrote the progress note for today (or yesterday).

Third - whoever is on call for that service - you can find this out using amion (for internal medicine) and the hospital operator / hospital directory for surgical services.



Internal Medicine services are complicated depending on the time of day. They have a night float system and the interns only take overnight call on weekends, but this is roughly how it works.

Each ward team (Med A, B, E1, E2, G, K, U, W) has one resident and two interns. The interns rotate q4 admitting call - you can figure out who's on call through amion. The resident is on call every other day and works 7am-7pm 6 days a week.

At 7pm during weekdays the daytime team (resident and both interns) leaves at 7pm after signing out to the night float. The nightfloat resident for each team (one resident for two teams - A/B, E, G/K, U/W) handles crosscover overnight and admits overnight patients. At 7am the next day the team gets their patients who were admitted overnight as "floats".

On Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights the intern stays overnight doing crosscover, and admits patients til 11pm.


-Gretchen