The undiluted message in psychiatry: Is medical rounding valuable?

Abstract

The present research investigated whether psychiatric inpatients would recall, without distortion, the key components of information presented to them during morning rounds. Over the 4 weeks of the study, the messages of rounding psychiatrists were recorded and then compared with the recollections of 16 subjects recorded several hours later. Analysis showed that undistorted recall of messages occurred significantly more often than distorted recall or no recall. These results suggest that there is a possible value for undiluted messages in medical rounding in the inpatient psychiatric context when given as an adjunct to psychotherapeutic and psychopharmacological interventions.