Abstract
A survey of outpatients at the Juntendo Koshigaya Hospital was carried out. Our mental hospital was established in 1968, and it came to be administered by the members of the Department of Psychiatry, School of Medicine in April 1989. We have previously reported some clinical characteristics of our hospital in an analysis of outpatient data.
In this paper, we compared two patient groups, those whose treatment began before April 1989 and those whose treatment began after that date. This study revealed that, after April 1989, we began to treat a wider of variety of disorders, and we received more referrals from other facilities. That is, the clinical characteristics of our hospital became similar to those of psychiatric treatment at the university hospital.
We also surveyed the duration of treatment for each patient. The average treatment term was much longer than that of psychiatric treatment at university hospitals. This seems to depend on the lower rates for our consultation compared with those of other facilities, because our hospital has 221 beds (open, semi-open, and closed psychiatric wards), so if patients needed admission, we could also provide treatment at our own hospital.
The two characteristics of clinical practice, cited above allow us to offer adequate clinical service to patients, however, we may have an increase in the number of outpatients. So we are concerned that patient waiting time may increase while consultation time may become shorter.
We must consider various problems in the mental health of the suburban population in the suburbs of megalopolis, where our hospital stands and we will try to propose further considerations for these problems.
