Rounding is the process of seeing hospitalized patients. How involved it is depends on how many people are involved in the patient’s care.

At a teaching hospital, here is how things go:

1. Very early in the morning, about 5–6AM, medical students and first-year residents will go see their patients, check labs, find out what happened to them overnight, and do an assessment. Smart ones will read the nursing notes or talk to the overnight nurse.
2. Sometime a bit after this, the senior resident leading the team will also round, doing more of a general overview of the patient charts and maybe stopping in to examine the sicker or more challenging patients.
3. At 7–7:30, the residents and students will have a morning conference with their attending physician. At this time they will hear about any new admissions that came in from the previous afternoon/evening on and discuss any major updates in condition or other patients.
4. Then the whole entourage goes out to round. In a teaching hospital, this can include the attending, possibly a fellow in advanced training, the senior resident, usually 4 junior residents, and possibly 4 medical students.
5. The team then visits each patient on the service. Everyone stuffs into the patient’s room. The junior resident caring for that patient, the senior resident, and the attending talk about the patient’s care, and a plan is made for the day. Everyone else on the team will be looking up at the television, which will be playing a morning talk show (in my training days it was always Sally Jessie Raphael) with the sound off. It doesn’t matter what problems the patient has or what is on the TV. Everyone else is looking at it.
6. Once all of the patients have been seen, everyone scatters to do whatever the team has decided on during the rounds.

In the absence of a big team, rounds can literally be one doctor seeing his own hospital patients.