Psychiatry Documentation Practice

 The study explores how psychiatrists see the role of AI in suicide risk assessment, and the early findings are particularly interesting: most clinicians are not yet ready to hand suicide risk prediction or stratification over to AI, believing that this remains a clinical judgement they can and should make themselves. Instead, they see greater value in using AI to ease the part of their work that takes up much of their professional time – the patient interview and the documentation that follows, through tools such as AI-assisted recording, transcription, summarisation and structured note generation.

The findings also show that documentation practices vary considerably, shaped by clinicians’ background, training, experience and workload. Importantly, the study also reveals how strongly patient care itself is shaped by sociocultural factors – what patients are willing to disclose, how clinicians interpret sensitive information, and what ultimately gets documented can all depend on the cultural and social context of the encounter.

This points to a more practical and context-sensitive role for AI: not replacing psychiatric judgement, but reducing workflow burden and helping clinicians capture more consistent and useful clinical information.

Phase Two is now underway, expanding interviews to more psychiatry residents and consultants across additional hospitals.