ABSTRACT
While interdisciplinary ward rounds have been shown to improve patient care in surgical disciplines such as trauma surgery, comparable ward rounds have not yet been regularly established in clinical psychiatry. Here, we present results of the interdisciplinary psychiatric ward round initiated as a pilot project at our university hospital, which mainly took place as a review of patients' medical charts during the study period (July 3 to December 11, 2020) due to restrictions in connection with the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Physicians from psychiatry, neurology, internal medicine/geriatrics, and clinical pharmacology were involved. A total of 295 reviews were conducted on 105 individual patients. A mean (± standard deviation) of 1.3 ± 0.8 recommendations were made per patient;these were distributed between 1.1 ± 0.8 pharmacological recommendations (PR) and 0.2 ± 0.2 general recommendations (GR). Among PRs, recommendations on antipsychotics were most common (14.4 % of all PRs), followed by antidepressants (8.9 % of all PRs). Among GRs, recommendations on diagnostic measures dominated (41.7 % of all GRs). Limitations of our pilot project mainly arise from the monocentric setting and the lack of a control group. Follow-up studies should examine whether interdisciplinary ward rounds in psychiatry can contribute to the improvement of patient-related outcomes and, among other things, reduce the number of adverse drug reactions. © 2021 Wissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft Stuttgart.