What's “pre-rounding”? What's “rounds”? For inpatient services, most of the planning and work on patients gets done before 10 a.m. “Rounds” refers to visiting, literally or figuratively, each patient on your team's service. There are several flavors of rounds. After pre-rounding to collect information on your patient, you and your team meet up for “work rounds,” which is where the resident is informed by students and interns about the state of the patients. This can last a couple of hours, if it's a large service and you're going room to room. Following work rounds often is “attending rounds,” a similar affair in which the patients are presented to the attending. (Sometimes there are no attending rounds, and the resident meets privately with the attending to “card flip” on the patients, which allows the team to do their work.)

A presentation at rounds involves summarizing the patient's findings, analyzing problems, and describing an action plan for the rest of the day. The format for a work rounds presentation is described in the next pages. For attending rounds, you usually skip the “S” and “O” and just give a brief version of “E” and the “A/P,” but otherwise it's similar.

To be ready for rounds, there must be a “pre-rounds.” This is when you, the medical student, gather your data, plan your presentation, and begin to write your note (a more detailed text version of what you present). By the way: Your note should be done as soon as possible, ideally by noon.