Supervision of the Resident's Initial Interview

Abstract

WE wish to report on our experience supervising second-year psychiatric residents who spend six months in adult outpatient work. The setting of our study is the Adult Outpatient Clinic in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Rochester (NY) Medical Center. The Adult Psychiatric Outpatient Clinic was established for those in the community and surrounding counties who cannot afford private care, and affords diagnostic evaluations and therapeutic services of many types. It receives referrals from a variety of sources, and about 25% of the patients are self-referred. A detailed study of our clinic operation has been recently reported.¹ Over the years we have evolved various procedures for evaluating the patients referred to us in an attempt to be more flexible and responsive and offer professional help as quickly as possible. At the present time we employ a triage method of a brief "screening" interview of every new patient by