What are you preparing to do?

Resources are organized by clinical task so you can locate the right support at the point of need.

Preparing for the Encounter

Review the available record, identify priorities, and enter the encounter with a focused but flexible plan.

Build rapport, follow the patient’s story, and gather a clinically useful psychiatric history without losing sight of safety or context.

Observe, elicit, distinguish, and document the patient’s current mental status with precise clinical language.

Integrate the evidence, prioritize a differential, explain the person’s presentation, and connect that understanding to the plan.

Use available evidence, manage uncertainty, and revise clinical reasoning as new information emerges.

Assess suicide, self-harm, violence, vulnerability, and acute impairment; formulate risk and match the response to the clinical situation.

Establish actual medication use, resolve discrepancies, evaluate benefit and harm, and build a patient-specific monitoring plan.