Consultation-liaison psychiatry in China

Ji, Jianlin; Ye, Chenyu

In 2002 He and colleagues [6] conducted a national project on mental health service utilization. They found that the utilization of inpatient mental health services was much greater in large municipal and provincial institutions than in smaller institutions, which had much lower occupancy rates. The mean annual number of mental health outpatient visits at the institutions was 8707, but the range in the number of visits varied by 30-fold. Typically the outpatient volume at psychiatric hospitals operated by the Ministry of Health was greater than at those operated by the Ministry of Civil Affairs Hospitals (which more commonly provide services to patients with chronic mental illnesses). The library services at the psychiatric hospitals were extremely limited, subscribing to a median of four academic journals. Among the psychiatric hospitals 19% had no residency training program and those that did have a training program lacked a uniform method and curriculum for training clinical psychiatrists. This shows the poor overall status of psychiatric services and training in the country, a fact that has seriously undermined the development of liaison psychiatry.