Outpatient consultation-liaison psychiatry: A valuable addition to the training of advanced psychiatry residents

Abstract

With current health care reimbursement conditions and recent research denoting the important relationship between mental health status and poor functioning, especially in medically ill patients, one would think that consultation-liaison (C-L) psychiatry would have an increasingly viable role in the outpatient health care sector. However, only a small number of outpatient C-L clinics are reported and recently several of these have folded. These outpatient C-L clinics can follow different clinical models and have the potential, especially at the residency and fellowship training levels, for interesting and useful educational opportunities. This paper describes a recently founded outpatient C-L clinic—the Medical Illness Clinic—in a university medical center's department of Psychiatry. We highlight the structure of the clinic, the kinds of patients seen, and focus on the unique educational residency training opportunities this setting presents. The results of clinic rotation evaluations by residents are also presented. We conclude with recommendations for more exploration of this clinical model and evaluation of its utility in psychiatric residency education.