Wyatt's Practical Psychiatric Practice: Forms and Protocols for Clinical use (3rd edn). Richard Jed Wyatt & Robert H. Chew Washington DC: American Psychiatric Publishing, 2005, $100.50, 240 pp (with CD-ROM). ISBN: 1585621099

To paraphrase René Magritte, this is not a book. As the title suggests, it is an extensive set of A4-sized sheets for use in everyday clinical practice, ring-bound to allow for easy photocopying. The two sections for clinicians provide basic record-keeping forms and rating scales. The two sections for patients and families provide information about psychiatric disorders and psychiatric medications. It is designed for the American market and so includes medical insurance forms, invoices and a final collection notice for those pesky late payers.

The idea of assembling a comprehensive set of clinical papers is terrific. However, this example sits uneasily with the needs of UK National Health Service practice. Most of the clinician forms are redundant, as trusts will usually have their own proformas. The tick box format of many sections encourages standardised collection of data, but with no tie-in to any database engine to aggregate and analyse the data collected. The rating scales might be useful but are available from other sources. The information for patients and families is admirably thorough, accurate and (on the whole) up to date, but is written in a jargonistic, technical style. I ran some of these sheets through the Flesch Reading Ease test, a standardised scale in which higher scores indicate greater readability. They averaged out at around 20, compared with a recommended level of 60-70 for public information. There is little information about psychological therapies or their effectiveness.

The bundled CD contains electronic PDF files of all the documents in the package. They cannot be altered but if you really want to customise them for your own use, it's the work of a moment to copy the text and paste it into a word processor for editing.

So, can I recommend it for UK practice? Not as it stands, although it provides a useful example of the tools that should be available to every psychiatrist. It might be helpful in private practice, although the difficulty in customising the forms would limit its appeal. I suspect that the patient information sheets might more often be used as aides memoire by the doctor.