OUTPATIENT CONSULTATION-LIAISON PSYCHIATRY - A VALUABLE ADDITION TO THE TRAINING OF ADVANCED PSYCHIATRY RESIDENTS

With current health care reimbursement conditions and recent research denoting the important relationship between mental health status and p oor functioning, especially in medically ill patients, one would think that consultation-liaison (C-L) psychiatry would have an increasingly viable role in the outpatient health care sector. However, only a sma ll number of outpatient C-L clinics are reported and recently several of these have folded. These outpatient C-L clinics can follow differen t clinical models and have the potential, especially at the residency and fellowship training levels, for interesting and useful educational opportunities. This paper describes a recently founded outpatient C-L clinic-the Medical Illness Clinic-in a university medical center's de partment of Psychiatry. We highlight the structure of the clinic, the kinds of patients seen, and focus on the unique educational residency training opportunities this setting presents. The results of clinic ro tation evaluations by residents are also presented. We conclude with r ecommendations for more exploration of this clinical model and evaluat ion of its utility in psychiatric residency education.