Psychiatric Consultations in General Hospitals: A Scoping Review

Abstract

Context: The rapid growth of psychiatric disorders requires psychiatric consultations to be provided on a greater scale, particularly for hospitalized patients. Objectives: The aim of this study was to evaluate the extent of psychiatric consultation requests in general hospitals and to identify potential gaps in the literature. Evidence Acquisition: This scoping review was based on relevant research published in Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed, Embase, and Cochrane (1977- Dec 2019). The collected literature was closely examined prior to selecting the applicable studies by means of peer review. Data were summarized within a framework of themes comprised of psychiatric consultation, prevalence of psychiatric disorders, hospital departments, diagnosis of psychiatric disorders, and nature of research prior to theoretical classification and tabulation. Results: Ultimately, 22 studies were included in this scoping review. Requests for psychiatric consultations were highest in Austria and Italy, with 22.6% and 13.6% of cases, respectively. The majority of requests were from internal and surgical departments. Consultations were requested more frequently for female patients compared to male patients. mood disorders and substance use disorder were the most diagnostic reports. Conclusions: Taking into consideration the prevalence of psychiatric disorders in patients suffering from physical illnesses, the referral rate results were considerably low. Although the frequency of psychiatric consultation reports vary widely between countries. As we limited the review to articles written in English, this may be due to selection bias. In this review, we identified that methodological differences and the use of different diagnostic criteria are major gaps that limit a definitive statistical comparison between studies.