Abstract
In December 2012, the Japanese General Hospital Psychiatry Survey 2012 sent questionnaires to 909 hospitals considered to provide general hospital psychiatric services, and 581 returned the questionnaires (response rate 63.9 %). The current report demonstrated an overall picture of services provided by general hospital psychiatry (GHP), in terms of structure and function of the institution, staff organization, service profiles, reimbursement of care, and financial situation. The survey demonstrated findings as follows: GHP provided valuable contributions to psychiatric care in emergency medicine, and to treatment of psychiatric disorders with comorbid physical illness, to name a few; the emergency services and treatment of patients with both psychiatric and physical illness were provided mainly in the facilities with psychiatric inpatient wards; the mean number of psychiatric inpatient beds in a hospital as below 50; the mean number of psychiatrists employed in a hospital was about 4; GHP had important therapeutic functions, including modified ECT, psychiatric emergency, and liaison-consultation psychiatry; high reimbursement for the inpatient charge for psychiatric emergency admission was not available to the most facilities; for a psychiatric inpatient ward, average hospitalization income per patient per day was less than half of that for a medical inpatient ward. Financial vulnerabilities observed in the previous surveys remained. Most institutions have not obtained merit from the current payment systems because of an excessively high requirement for the qualification of reimbursement. It is necessary to observe the impact of the revision of medical service fees this year on the financial situation of GHP.
