Discrepancy Between Expectations and Service in Psychiatric Consultation

Abstract

THE LITERATURE about liaison psychiatry is still scanty and the status and scope of this branch of psychiatry is insufficiently defined. Such service often leads to frustrations and dissatisfactions both for the psychiatric consultant and for the nonpsychiatric physicians on the various hospital services. The purpose of this study was to try and clarify some of the sources of this mutual dissatisfaction. Though we hypothesized that the difficulties might mostly be due to covert or unconscious factors, we wanted, as a first step, to elucidate the more overt factors. The hypotheses put forward in this study are therefore: (A) the dissatisfaction of consultant and consultee in their partnership is due in part to the discrepancy between the expectations of the consultee and the services given by the consultant, and to the discrepancy between the expectations for demands for service of the consultants and the service demanded by the consultees;