The objective of this study was to review outcomes of acute service delivery in old age psychiatry. Sources of data included Medline, PsycINFO and Cochrane Collaboration databases of English language papers to 1998 on service delivery evaluation in 'old age psychiatry', 'psychogeriatrics' and 'geriatric psychiatry', supplemented by a manual search of references from relevant literature. All con...

This article reviews some of the recent data concerning Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry in a general hospital. As the organic medical conditions have a major impact on the one's quality of life and self-awareness as an ill-person, very often a psychiatric disorder appears as co-morbidity. It is the responsibility of the psychiatrist to recognize and to treat these psychiatric conditions, and al...

PURPOSE This paper illustrates some guidelines for the implementation of Consultation-liaison services in contexts where GPs work alone. We present some activity data of our experience in the period 1999-2004 and a critical evaluation of what works and what does not work. CONTEXT In Italy single-sited spontaneous initiatives of co-operation and integration between general practice and psychia...

Kongwashit by a community-wide outbreakof severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).During the period of the outbreak,10 patientswith SARSwith psychiatric complicationswerereferred to our Consultation and Liaison Psychiatry Teamfor assessment andmanagement.We found that boththe direct and indirect effects of SARS such as symptom severity, total isolation during treatment and administration of st...

Consult-liaison psychiatrists often encounter difficult clinical scenarios. We present a pediatric case of presumptive coprophagia. After a negative medical work-up, the pediatrics team asked psychiatry to assist them in managing this relatively rare disorder in the hospital setting. Little is known about the etiology and treatment of coprophagia in the pediatric population. Using the case as a...

I 1978, Regier (1) coined the term “de facto mental health services system” after finding that most patients with mental illness are treated in the general medical sector, not in psychiatric settings. Despite this, many patients with mental disorders treated in the medical sector do not have a diagnosis; they go untreated or are treated for a “medical” problem instead of their mental disorder. ...

Τhe empowerment of patients is a key aspect of professionalism in psychiatry. The sensitive, accurate and timely imparting of information is one of the highest expectations that patients and carers have of health-care professionals. In the course of his clinical work in Liaison Psychiatry the author has developed an information leaflet which reflects established practice and emerging evidence i...

Although psychiatry has a long tradition in Switzerland, C–L psychiatry is a newcomer. The continuous reduction in recent years of the number of beds in psychiatric hospitals favored the development of C–L services. The results of a survey of C–L psychiatry showed that in Switzerland C–L services are provided in general hospitals, even in the small and rural ones [1]. An important step was achi...

AIMS AND METHOD At a London teaching hospital, the existing off-site consultation model psychiatric liaison service for older people was replaced with an on-site liaison model service in December 2000. Several indicators of the functioning of the service were audited using identical methods before and after this change. RESULTS The case-load increased by 50%, but the liaison psychiatrists were ...

Handover is a high risk point for errors in clinical care, in many cases leading to adverse events or near misses. The timely transfer of accurate and useful information between professionals is vital to ensure quality and safety, and to ensure the transfer of accountability for care. In this project standards were developed for quality handover between doctors in a liaison psychiatry departmen...