Abstract
Evidence focusing on medically serious suicide attempts is lacking despite recommendations of mental health services to provide psychological assessments to all patients who have attempted suicide. Tokyo Metropolitan Tama Medical Center, a core general hospital in the Tama area, Tokyo, has a consultation-liaison service that is available around-the-clock. We retrospectively examined all patients with suspected psychiatric illness who were transported to our hospital by the municipal tertiary emergency service and received a consultation with the liaison team between April 2014 and March 2016 to identify their clinical features and to determine the current state of cooperation between the departments of emergency medicine and neuropsychiatry. The median age of the 272 patients was 41.5 years (quartile: 28.0-51.3 years) and males comprised 41.5% of the population, closely reflecting previous reports from university hospitals. The present study suggested a tendency that serious suicide attempters transported by the tertiary emergency service were relatively elderly and mostly male compared to previous reports which examined all emergency cases. By the following day, 76.1% received consultation, and within two days, 68.8% were discharged, which showed a faster tendency than in previous reports. Psychiatric hospitalization was indicated in 22.4% of the patients. Further inter-departmental and inter-facility cooperation to establish effective intervention guidelines is desired.
