Referrals of patients with schizophrenia to a consultation-liaison psychiatry service

Abstract

Background

There are few studies specifically investigating the acute treatment procedures of patients with schizophrenia in the context of Consultation-liaison psychiatry (CLP).

Purpose

Describe the main clinical features of the referrals of patients with schizophrenia, attended by a general hospital CLP service.

Methods

Longitudinal observational and descriptive study, assessing adult inpatients with schizophrenia (DSM-IV-TR criteria) admitted to non-psychiatric units of Hospital Clínic of Barcelona (Spain), who were consecutively referred to our CLP service over a 10-year period (from January 1, 2005, through December 31, 2014).

Results

During that period, 9.808 psychiatric consultations were requested. 163 of them (1.8%) concerned patients with schizophrenia. These groups of patients were aged 50.9 ± 15.3 years and 65% were male. A 25.9% of patients had history of suicide attempts and 45.6% presented current psychosocial stressors.

Characteristics of referrals Referral sources according to medical specialties are shown in Table 1.

The major medical conditions for referral according to ICD-10 categories were: external causes of morbidity (21.5%), infectious diseases (13.5%) and diseases of the digestive system (10.4%).

The two most frequent reasons for referral were the assessment of psychopharmacological treatment and/or psychopathological state examination (62%) and suicidal risk/attempt assessment (8.6%).

Conclusions

In our sample, only a 1.8% of all patients for whom psychiatric consultation was requested had a diagnosis of schizophrenia. The most common profile of them was: male, 50 years old, coming from general medicine department due external causes of morbidity and referred to the CLP service because of psychiatric state and/or medication review.

Disclosure of interest

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.