Abstract
The summary of the obtained findings were as follows: GHP provides valuable contributions to psychiatric care in many fields including emergency medicine, palliative care, and psychiatric training courses for residents. The above services are provided mainly in facilities that have psychiatric inpatient beds. The basic inpatient charge for facilities with a patient-nurse ratio of 13:1 has been introduced, and about a third of the hospitals that had been qualified for the basic inpatient charge for a ward with a patient-nurse ratio of 15:1 shifted to a new one. Many hospitals kept almost the same number of psychiatric inpatient beds, but there were more hospitals with increased psychiatric beds than those with decreased ones. Hospitals with inpatient wards employed more co-medical staff than those without ones, but the number of staff was one or two for each profession in each institute. Hospitals with psychiatric inpatient wards have important functions, including modified ECT, psychiatric emergency, and liaison-consultation psychiatry. High reimbursement for inpatient charges for psychiatric emergency admission was not available in most facilities. Financial vulnerabilities observed in many general hospital psychiatry were improved in a portion of the facilities to some extent by the revision of the medical service fee of 2010. However, a host of institutions have not obtained any merit from these reforms due to the too high standard for acquiring the high reimbursement. It is necessary to further investigate what influences the revision has made on GHP in more detail.
