OBJECTIVE Collaboration between psychiatry and palliative medicine has the potential to enhance the quality of medical practice. The integration between palliative care and psychiatry has been attempted only in discrete medical settings and is not yet firmly established as an institution. Our objective was to determine the availability and degree of integration between psychiatric consultation-...

recognition of psychosomatic disorders. Liaison psychiatry demands a different set of specialised skills to those required in general adult psychiatry. The liaison psychiatrist must be adept at assessing relevant physical findings in addition to mental state, at engaging individuals with somatic presentations of psychiatric illness and at managing those with psychiatric and physical comorbidity...

To assess the attitude and knowledge of physicians and patients towards psychiatry, we asked 115 referring doctors and 188 referred patients to complete questionnaires. We examined the results along with the referral rates to try to identify factors that may affect a consultation-liaison psychiatry service. Generally, knowledge was poor and attitudes towards psychiatry negative in both groups. ...

Medications often induce neuropsychiatric side-effects. This article reviews psychiatric side-effects that are well known and describes those induced by recently developed medications. Therapeutic innovations have been prominent in the treatment of HIV infection, Parkinson’s disease and epilepsy and therefore psychiatric side-effects caused by these agents are described in more detail. Nora Tur...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the usefulness of Casemix as a data collection system for consultation-liaison psychiatry services. METHOD Health information staff were requested to code psychiatric assessments and diagnosis prospectively for admissions to the Alfred Hospital, Melbourne, between July 2002 and June 2004 using Casemix. RESULTS Psychiatric assessments were requested on 2.5% of all hospi...

recognition of psychosomatic disorders. Liaison psychiatry demands a different set of specialised skills to those required in general adult psychiatry. The liaison psychiatrist must be adept at assessing relevant physical findings in addition to mental state, at engaging individuals with somatic presentations of psychiatric illness and at managing those with psychiatric and physical comorbidity...

recognition of psychosomatic disorders. Liaison psychiatry demands a different set of specialised skills to those required in general adult psychiatry. The liaison psychiatrist must be adept at assessing relevant physical findings in addition to mental state, at engaging individuals with somatic presentations of psychiatric illness and at managing those with psychiatric and physical comorbidity...

BACKGROUND Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry (CLP) is a subspecialty of psychiatry that provides care to inpatients under non-psychiatric care. Despite evidence of benefits of CLP for inpatients with psychiatric comorbidities, referral rates from hospital doctors remain low. This review aims to understand barriers to CLP inpatient referral as described in the literature. METHODS We searched on ...