A Year of Liaison Psychiatry in General Hospital

in recent years, Liaison Psychiatry has acquired a growing importance in Psychiatry and in non-psychiatric Wards of General Hospitals. In Portugal there is already a large number of general Hospitals with specialized units that function on the interface of mental disorders and somatic illness. The authors intend to characterise the population assessed by a Liaison Psychiatry Unit of a General Hospital, in order to optimize resources and develop more adequate future therapeutic interventions. A retrospective analysis was performed of the referrals to the Liaison Psychiatry Unit, at the Santa Maria Hospital in Lisbon, during one year, with a random sample of 318 patients. A slight majority of thel referrals belonged to female patients. The 56 to 65 and the 66 to 75 years age groups were the most prevalent, the referrals were issued in their majority by the Medical Wards, and the main reason for the requested assessment were suicide attempts and depressive symptoms, with no differences between both genders. A third of the referrals presented more than one reason, mainly the presence of a psychiatric history. The more frequent diagnoses were Adjustment Disorder and Moderate Depression. When these data were crossed with patients gender and referral source, there were no statistically significant differences. The therapeutic intervention was mainly psychopharmacological and in a single observation. The patients were, mainly, referred to Outpatient Psychiatric Consultations or to General Practitioners. The analysed sample was representative of the total of referrals in the assessed period. The referral reason and the syndromatic diagnoses are in accordance with what is described in the literature, with no differences between the differ variables studied.