Crossing the bridge - A prospective comparative study of the effect of communication between a hospital based consultation-liaison service and primary care on general practitioners' concordance with consultation-liaison psychiatrists' recommendations

摘要

Objective: Concordance with consultation-liaison (CL) psychiatrists' recommendations by general practitioners (GP) has hardly been studied systematically. We studied if telephone calls or written notes from a hospital based CL-service to GPs, whose patients were treated on medical-surgical wards, can improve GP-concordance, as compared to the usual communication pathway by standard discharge letters written by hospital physicians, and if higher GP-concordance improves outcomes of depressive and anxious symptoms.