Establishment of a cooperative operating system between a critical care center and neighboring psychiatric hospitals

Abstract

We have established a system in which an emergency doctor from the critical care center at Kansai Medical University hospital paid weekly visits to four psychiatric hospitals within the same medical service area for medical examination starting in November 2013. We investigated the extent to which this system influenced the establishment of cooperative links between the critical care center and psychiatric hospitals. We compared the three and a half year period (April 2010-October 2013) preceding the introduction of this system with the two year period following it (November 2013-October 2015). Furthermore, we retrospectively analyzed the following items of two periods. : the ratio for the psychiatric patients with the whole patient, outcomes in patients following suicide attempts, and the transfer requests for patients with coexisting physical and mental illness. The number of hospitalization of patients with coexisting physical and psychiatric illness as well as those transferred to a psychiatric hospital following a suicide attempt was considerably increased within the latter period. We considered that the establishment of a cooperative system between a critical care center and psychiatric hospitals might be strengthened by the introduction of the visit system.