Becoming a Consummate Clinician. What Every Student, House Officer and Hospital Practitioner Needs to Know

Description

The Consummate Clinician offers hospital-based physicians an organizing framework for coping with daily challenges both in patient care and in teaching. The book describes in a highly formatted, easily accessible way exactly how physicians and physicians-in-training can think critically and act decisively in this age of medical information overload. Special emphasis is on (1) error avoidance and reduction – a topic that has long been championed by hospitalists, (2) efficient practice management for best patient outcomes and improved cost control, (3) the use of evidence-based medicine, and (4) improving communication among and between physicians and other staff in the hospital setting. Using real-world clinical examples and scenarios, the book focuses on essential topics, many of which tend to fall between the cracks of print and electronic resources. Pearls and pitfalls of gathering, processing, and communicating medical information are presented, but more than these, this book is meant as a kind of clinical GPS—a way of helping hospital-based physicians find their clinical coordinates and keep their bearings in the face of new challenges and uncertainties. In addition to the clinical scenarios featured throughout, additional mini-cases are collected at the end of the book. The over-arching goal of this new resource is to enrich the way hospital-based physicians think about diagnosis, therapy, and prognosis, especially at the warp-speed of “ward world,” which increasingly lurches between the frazzled and the frantic.