Psychiatric Care in a General Hospital Emergency Room

Abstract

Introduction The general purpose of this study is to obtain some understanding of the use of the emergency room in a general hospital as a psychiatric, or in a wider sense, as a psychosocial community resource. Several national surveys^4,8have disclosed that more and more patients with every kind of problem and complaint are turning for care to general hospital emergency rooms. In a previous paper,¹we have reviewed possible reasons for this trend and have offered some suggestions regarding the kinds of patients with psychiatric problems who come to the emergency room, why they come at a particular time, and what they hope to achieve as a result of their visit. In this study we intend to present the statistical data on our population focusing on the personal and social characteristics of the patients such as age, sex, race, marital status, area of residence, and socioeconomic group.