Alexis Benedetto – 2nd year New Haven Fellow

Good morning and welcome to a day in my life on the consultation liaison service!

I am so excited for you to come along with me and get to experience a little bit of the Yale Child Study Center in detail. I usually wake up around 7:30 am and make a big breakfast to get the day started and I pack my lunch for the day. Once I get ready for the day I hop in the car, I live in Branford, a 20 minute drive to the hospital and park in the parking garage with my pass and take the walking bridge to the main hospital. Though most of my co-fellows live in downtown New Haven and walk to work so there are plenty of options based on what you look for in terms of housing.

The CL service is based from the Yale Children’s Hospital and is with Dr. Moreno three days a week and Dr. Cardona two days a week which to me is a bonus to get to learn from two different teaching styles. We begin by meeting in the social worker’s office on the seventh floor of the hospital. They are a huge part of our CL team and we work very closely to help arrange follow up and transfer for our patients and couldn’t do our job there without them! Today we discuss a long-term patient with substance use disorder and difficulty with placement and liaise with the incredible addiction psychiatrist, DCF and social work prior to seeing him. Then we discuss any new cases that come in overnight and begin with my favorite part of the day, the patient interactions. While our service is acute, I love being able to feel like we can take the time that we need to work with our patients and their families to determine the most appropriate in hospital and eventually out of hospital recommendations. We stop by the pediatric work rooms to ensure that we keep the pediatric residents, attendings and floor staff on the same page with all our recommendations. This generally takes most of the morning and then around lunchtime we take a break to eat. However today, I have Young Child Supervision which is Thursdays from 12:30 – 1:30 pm for my group and we meet with Dr. Close to discuss our young child patient’s. I see a four-year-old patient weekly for evaluation of hyperactivity and impulsivity and she is so helpful in helping me translate his play into a way that I can understand. Our co-fellows also provide suggestions and I like meeting over lunch in a way that feels informative but communal.

On this day I am on day call, meaning I keep my Yale Mobile Heartbeat phone on from 8 am to 5 pm to receive any new consults that might come in. We are generally on day call about one to two times per week and night call from home one to two times per week (5 pm to 8 am home shift). While Yale is one of the more call intensive programs that I interviewed at, I knew that I wanted to walk away from both residency (I was in a busy NYC program) and child and adolescent psychiatry fellowship with a lot of experience in a training role so I would feel more comfortable as an attending, and I am so grateful for that! The CL service is a great place to get experience and we are also able to learn along with the attendings as we have a few medical presentations that are one of one hundred in the world for instance. After case discussions and today after Young Child Supervision, I sit in the CL office in 230 S Frontage and write my notes and review any final chart updates that came in through the day. The remainder of the afternoon is generally spent cleaning up my email box while having a snack and if I have time I like to walk over to Wini to see my co-fellows, social workers and the attendings and catch up with everyone for a few minutes.

Before I know it the day has flown by and I head back home. My favorite part of living in Branford is the proximity to the water, I usually go for a walk by the beach in the evenings and then make dinner before heading to bed. I usually clean up from the day and read for a bit and call it a night. Thank you for joining me for a day in my life!