A Year of Liaison Psychiatry in a General Hospital

Abstract

Liaison Psychiatry has acquired in recent years a growing importance in Psychiatry and non-psychiatric services in general hospitals. In Portugal there are already many General Hospitals with specialized teams in interface between mental illness and soma. The authors aim to characterize the population evaluated in Liaison Psychiatry in a General Hospital in order to optimize resources and better tailor the interventions.

The authors performed a retrospective analysis of requests made to the Liaison Psychiatry Team, at Hospital de Santa Maria, for a year. A random sample of 318 patients was selected. In total a slight majority of requests corresponded to females patients. The most prevalent age ranges were from 56 to 65 and 66 to 75 yrs and most request were issued by the Department of Medicine and the main reasons for evaluation by Liaison Psychiatry were suicide attempts and depressive symptoms, with no differences between the two sexes. One third of the requests had more than one reason, mainly the presence of psychiatric history. The most frequent diagnoses were Adjustment Disorders and Moderate Depression. When we crossed this data with sex and origin of the request, there were no statistically significant differences. The intervention was conducted mostly with psychopharmacological therapy, with a single observation in most cases. The referral of patients at discharge was mainly to the Psychiatry Outpatien Clinic and to the family doctor (GP). The sample was representative of all requests in the study period. The reason for requesting the observation and the syndromic diagnoses are consistent with those described in the literature and there were no variations between the different variables.