Ward Rounds

Inpatient Ward Rounds

Ward rounds will be different in each department. In general, medical specialities should have a consultant ward round of all patients once or twice per week with daily junior ward rounds in between. General surgery patients tend to have a registrar ward round daily with a consultant grand round once per week. This depends on the specialty with some being more consultant-led than others.

Post Take Ward Rounds (PTWR)

The Acute Medical Unit (AMU) at NGH operates a specialty based post-take ward round system. Every day at least one junior staff member (usually FY1) is allocated to Acute Medicine, Respiratory, Gastroenterology and Diabetes & Endocrinology. They will go on a ward round with the consultant ‘on take’ for the day, see all new patients that have been admitted and complete jobs accordingly. The junior on PTWR for that day should attend AMU prior to 8.30am to print out a list of patients, attend AMU handover at 8.30am to be told about any acutely unwell or priority patients, and then join the consultant on the PTWR. The patients then remain the responsibility of the junior on the PTWR for the day and not the consultant’s usual team. These patients should be moved to specialty base wards over the course of the next day but if they remain on AMU the following day, they should be allocated between teams as outliers.

Acute general surgical admissions are seen on post-take ward round with a first on and second on consultant. One of these will be colorectal and one for upper GI/HPB. An FY1 from the colorectal team and one from the upper GI and HPB team will join each consultant depending on which team the consultant belongs to. These teams are colour coded and ward based. These ward rounds tend to be quite quick and afterwards the jobs can be handed to the Surgical Assessment Centre FY1 who covers the jobs for acute admissions on this ward. After this the post-take FY1 doctors head back to their base ward to continue any ward jobs. Vascular and plastics have their own arrangements to post-take patients, but due to much smaller numbers of patients these are usually seen as part of the inpatient ward round, rather than on a separate post-take ward round.