Preface

 

The Hospitalist Handbook represents the culmination of several years of effort on behalf of the Internal Medicine housestaff at the University of California, San Francisco to make a thorough, yet concise, bedside guide to inpatient clinical medicine.  The Hospitalist Handbook began as the Housestaff Handbook several years ago and has served as both an educational tool for its authors as well as a valuable resource for students, housestaff, and attending physicians. 

 

Due to the popularity in recent years of the Department of Medicine’s Housestaff Handbook, we conducted a survey of housestaff and students at UCSF regarding the possibility of making the handbook publicly available.  The overwhelming response was that the handbook was an extremely valuable resource and that it should be made available to all who wish to use it for the purposes of education and patient care. 

 

Coinciding with the expansion and refinement of the handbook over the past years has been the rapid rise of Hospitalist Medicine throughout the country.   We realized that our Housestaff Handbook could be a valuable resource for anyone engaged in hospitalist care. Therefore, we made it our goal to make the Hospitalist Handbook more than just an officially published form of the previous version of the handbook.  Instead, the handbook has been completely updated and edited with all types of “hospitalists” in mind.  Anyone engaged in inpatient medicine—medical students, residents of all specialties, hospitalist physicians, nurse practioners, physician assistants, and others will find the handbook easy to read and practical in its approach to common problems in inpatient medicine.  In addition, almost every topic in the handbook is now annotated with landmark trials and review articles as key references.  There are also new sections on critical care medicine as well as medical consultation—key areas of Hospitalist Medicine.

 

As stated earlier, the Hospitalist Handbook is a result of the efforts of many past and present housestaff in the Department of Medicine at UCSF.  The following physicians have all been past contributors to the handbook: Susan Alt, Anna Bloxham, Carolyn Calfee, Paul Campbell, Ethan Canin, Tom Chen, Peter Chin-Hong, Molly Conroy, Sarah Cooley, Ian de Boer, Fiona Dulbecco, Darryl Elmouchi, Monica Gandhi, Anil Gehi, Andrei Goga, Nathan Gunn, Samir Gupta, Steve Harr, Mary Beth Humphrey, Todd Kim, Ajay Kirtane, Kiran Khush, Sei Lee, Amy Levin, Debbie Lindes, Pam Ling, Annie Luetkemeyer, Samantha Pitts, Josefa Rangel, Kiki Rutkowski, Brad Sharpe, Robin Shaw, Eddie Siew, Michael Steinman, Jack Tsao, Elizabeth Turner, Jim Uyeki, Doug White, and Roni Zeiger.

 

The Hospitalist Handbook is a perennial work in progress.   We are always looking for ways to improve the handbook’s content in order to make it more accurate, practical, and coherent, as well as concise.  If you have any comments, suggestions, or corrections, please e-mail sshah@medicine.ucsf.edu so that we can continue to enhance the value of this resource.