Hi everyone!. At the moment I am on a neuro placement at RPH Shenton Park in the out-patients department. Patients come in to us after they have been discharged from the ward on a twice weekly basis. "Reflecting" back on our whole studies in neuro, we have been taught how to do various assessments ie tone, cerebellar, cranial nerves etc but I am now having trouble putting these into perspective in an outpatient setting. When a patient is in the ward, you are seeing them daily and testing absolutely everything you can think of progressively throughout their stay in hospital ie you test everything. In an outpatient setting, patients have all recovered to some extent (enough to be discharged) and all come in with a wide variety of issues. Consequently, I had absolutely no idea which assessments were necessary and which were an absolute waste of time ie I had no idea where to start when a new patient arrived! Was I supposed to test vision? Was I supposed to test cranial nerves? Did I need to check sensation? Our supervisor knows each patient as she has treated each one previously on the ward so can pick her assessment up from where she left off. She states in an outpatient setting she never checks sensation, or perceptual deficits as the main goal is to improve motor function. Apparantly it is not time efficient to test everything. Hmm. I saw no other way to resolve this problem then simply to ask? Our supervisor gave us the answers (which was lucky as this is our assessment). I feel I know how to do things, but not necessarily when to do things in an outpatients setting. Reflecting back on our studies, perhaps it would have benefited me now if I had clarified which assessments were relevant in an outpatient setting, other than motor function.