Med-Psych

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

A new internal medicine/psychiatry outpatient clinic was recently established at Charleston Area Medical Center (CAMC). This report describes the clinical profiles of the first 52 patients and also reviews the clinic's staffing, facilities, referral sources and reimbursement. For large community hospitals, a med-psych clinic may be a useful method of providing psychiatric treatment to medically-ill outpatients.

Although medical-psychiatric units may have unique advantages for treating patients with combined medical and psychiatric illness, they may be costly to run, and their success requires a sound financial basis. This begins with filling beds and instituting a waiting list, and then setting admission priorities to regulate case mix deliberately to address financial as well as ethical and clinical considerations. Development of short-stay geropsychiatric evaluation services may offset financial problems associated with long stays of elderly patients requiring definitive treatment for complex conditions...