Teaching psychosocial issues to pediatric house officers

The most effective method of teaching psychosocial pediatrics to house officers apparently has not been ascertained. Therefore, in a study reported here, a controlled trial was performed to test whether a child psychiatrist accompanying a ward team on daily rounds would influence the attention given by the residents to psychosocial problems. The study population consisted of two ward teams over two months and the intervention limited to one team during the second month. The presence of a child psychiatrist on daily rounds did not influence the proportion of notes mentioning psychosocial problems nor the proportion of informative psychosocial notes in the intervention group. There was no significant relationship of notes to the age, sex, or payment status of the patient. However, the presence of the psychosocial notes and the information in them did vary with follow-up plans, type of consultations ordered, and admission and discharge diagnoses. In this article the authors discuss implications of the findings in the context of the dichotomy between the biomedical and biopsychosocial models of patient care.