Goals and Objectives

Goals and Objectives: Refractory Care Clinic

Conduct interviews in psychotic individuals, making use of all available resources. Learn to efficiently read through old medical charts.
Identify resistance in patients and how best to deal with it.
Generate differential diagnoses and the mechanisms for clarifying the diagnosis.
Identify target symptoms and prioritize them for intervention. Learn to identify affective symptoms in persons who are markedly psychotic.
Select medications based on prior experience of patient, targeted symptoms, associated symptoms and patients physical health.
Decide when hospitalization is needed and work with inpatient unit to establish achievable outcomes.
Develop short term treatment objectives. Identify symptoms or conditions that are most amendable to psychotherapy.
Communicate information efficiently to referring agencies and providers.

Become completely familiar with DSM-IV criteria for psychotice disorders, including personality disorders and substance use that may present with psychotic symptoms.
Learn tools available for addressing each of the items on a differential diagnosis, particularyly those involving organic disorders.
Learn about the necessary work up for different psychotropic medications used to treat serious mental illness, and how to monitor them for efficacy and adverse events.
Become completly familiar with advantages and risks of available antipsychotic agents, mood stabilizers, and antidepressants and their role in managing psychotic patients.
Develop familiarity with those symptoms or conditions which are most amenable to other therapeutic intervantions.

Compasion and an ability to convery interest in patients' strenghts as well as their limitations.
Convey optimism and at the same time be able to empathize with the degree of disappointment experiences by the patient anf the family
Maintain focus on gathering necessary information to make informed decisions and diagnosis, medications, and generation of a treatment plan.