Trends of Psychiatric Consultation in Rasoul Akram Hospital

The present study aimed to assess the characteristics of psychiatric consultations and their changes over a 3-year period in Rasoul Akram Hospital, (Tehran, Iran). The consultations’ characteristics of various hospital wards were retrospectively evaluated since 2007 to 2010 and some characteristics like gender, the reason of consultation request, the requesting ward for consultation, request and consultation date and psychiatric diagnosis were recorded. The data were analyzed using c2 and matched-paired t-test. During the study period, for 1.09% of the inpatients, a psychiatric consultation was requested. Most of the referrals were from internal medicine department. Current psychiatric symptoms (55%) and unexplained physical symptoms (16%) were the most prevalent reasons for referral; and major depressive disorder (27.7%), delirium (11.8%) and substance dependency (10.2%) were the most common psychiatric diagnoses. There were no significant differences between the two time periods (2007 and 2010) based on the total number of consultations, gender of patients, the requesting ward for consultation and lag time. Although the rate of referrals from some departments such as neurology had significant difference (p<0.05), the reason for consultations were not different between the two periods (p≥0.05). The rate of substance dependency in 2010 was more than 2007 (p=0.001). Further such studies are necessary for monitoring up the changes of consultations’ patterns.