Impact of the addition of a clinical pharmacist to a community hospital psychiatric consult liaison team.

Abstract

The objective of this data analysis was to assess the impact of the addition of a clinical psychiatric pharmacist to a community hospital inpatient psychiatric consult liaison team. Consult liaison psychiatry deals with medically ill patients in general hospital settings and involves the timely recognition and treatment of mental health conditions while coordinating with other medical providers. Each patient consulted to the psychiatry team was reviewed by the clinical pharmacist. Recommendations made by the clinical pharmacist were tracked over a 9-month period. During that time frame, 596 opportunities for intervention were identified. The largest proportion of identified opportunities for intervention were related to admission medication reconciliation, equating to roughly 30%. Optimization of safe medication use had the second largest number of opportunities for intervention at approximately 27%. Additional data, such as time spent on patient care, reason for consultation, and number of accepted recommendations based on medication class/type of intervention, were collected.