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What is Liaison Psychiatry? Liaison Psychiatry, otherwise know as Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry, is the provision of psychiatric services in non-mental health settings. The non-mental health setting is usually taken to be a general hospital although there is a grey area when it comes to providing services in primary care. Personally I think this is an integral part of community care but others would disgree. |
Useful Links
Liaison Psychiatry in older adults Psychiatric services to emergency departments - another Royal College of Psychiatrists report this time with useful principles and guidelines around emergency department provision of services. Managing urgent mental health needs in the acute trust - an excellent 2008 guide produced by the Academy of Royal Colleges in the UK. It's the result of a collaboration between psychiatrists, physicians, nurses and emergency department specialists that addresses specifically the mental health needs of people presenting to emergency departments and acute medical and surgical wards.
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North Shore Hospital, Takapuna, Auckland
Quote from foreword to "Managing urgent mental health needs in the acute trust
It is a matter of shame that this document is needed, but needed it most certainly is. We witness mental distress and mental illness daily, in people of all ages and in many different circumstances. Yet in our society they command less priority than do physical problems. Whatever the reasons, and the judgements and prejudices that still surround mental problems, they cannot ever warrant the relative neglect that people experience and report in the circumstances described in this document.
In few places is this relative neglect more common or more evident than in the emergency departments and the medical and surgical inpatient wards of acute hospitals. Many people are brought to Emergency Departments in acute distress, often in despair some having harmed themselves deliberately; many are seriously disturbed or made ill by substance misuse, many are distressed as a consequence of the illness or injury that has brought them to hospital. And among people with a physical illness or injury serious enough to require admission, a high proportion of them have a mental health problem, frequently masked or overlooked.