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The Medical Take

The Medical Take is an essential part of the acute service here at Frimley Park. Whether you're one of the AMU residents rotating through here as part of your placement, or a Medicine resident spending time here on-call, this page should take you through everything you need to know.

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If you are new to the take at Frimley, please familiarise yourself with our core principles and the key tenets we expect our resident doctors to follow when clerking.

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Once you've covered that, you can move on to our induction section to familiarise yourself with how the take runs.

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Alternatively, if you've come to this on the day of your first shift and just need the headlines, click here to go straight to the essentials.

3 Core Principles

Excellent Quality 
& Excellent Flow

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A Hub for
GIM Education

There's No Place
Like Home

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7 KEy STANDARDS

This is what we expect from residents doctors clerking on the medical take.

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1. Check in at the beginning of your shift and check out at the end

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2. Pick up patients in time order, unless acuity dictates otherwise

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3. Aim to clerk at a rate of one patient per hour

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4. See the patient face-to-face before extensively reviewing their record

5. Follow the admission navigator to ensure no steps are missed

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6. Commit to a diagnosis and a plan for every patient

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7. Clerk patients in parallel, not in series, to minimise time waste

BEFORE YOUR
FIRST SHIFT

Please familiarise yourself with the principles and tenets above - these are vital to understanding how the take at Frimley works.

 

Use the guides below to set up the medical take list on oyur EPIC log on and familiarise yourself with the admission navigator in advance. These steps are essential to ensuring your first shift runs smoothly.

YOUR FIRST SHIFT

The first on-call shift in a new department can be nerve-wracking, even for an experienced resident doctor. This section takes you through what to do on your first day, step-by-step.

Step 1
Check in with the medical registrar on-call. You'll find them in ED Majors, unless it's handover time (in which you case you should attend handover in person). The med reg will add you to the take team group on EPIC and help you orientate yourself. They will be your first port of call if you have questions or concerns.

Step 2
Access the medical take list and sign in as a resident doctor. If you haven't done so already, you'll first need to set this up to work with your EPIC access.

Step 3
Assign yourself to a patient using the instructions included here. You must pick up the patient who has been waiting longest to be seen, to keep wait times to a minimum. If you're not sure who to see first, speak to the med reg.

Step 4
Give the patient's electronic record a brief once over, but do NOT spend more than 5 minutes pre-clerking. It's crucial you get into the room to see the patient as quickly as possible. The take list includes the patient's location, which will most likely still be in the Emergency Department.

Step 5
Take a detailed history from the patient and perform a focussed clinical examination. This should include a detailed social and medication history.

Step 6
Once you have all the information you need from the patient, work your way through the admission navigator. This will ensure important admission tasks - such as the VTE risk assessment and the medicines reconcilliation - are not missed.

Step 7
Complete your clerking by documenting your diagnosis (what you think is going on) and your plan (how you'd like to manage this). The clerking is not complete until both of these have been documented.

Step 8
Steps 3 to 7 should take no more than one hour. You are now ready to post-take your patient with the consultant. If the consultant isn't available, you are expected to pick up another patient and continue clerking until the consultant is available.

Step 9
Post-take your patient with the consultant. During the post-take review, you should complete a post-take note on EPIC. Once this is done, you should complete any jobs that have arisen during the post-take review.

Step 10
At the end of your shift, you must hand over any outstanding jobs and let the medical registrar know you are leaving. If you are finishing a night shift, you are expected to attend the morning handover to present your patients.

For all patient queries, please see the Frimley Park NHS Trust website.

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