Factors related to admission of psychiatric patients to medical wards from the general hospital emergency department: a 3-year study of urgent psychiatric consultations.

Objective: Emergency Rooms (ER) of Emergency Departments (ED) in General Hospitals (GH) have a role in providing for psychiatric evaluation. The aims of the present study were to examine the decision-making process of consultation psychiatry at the GH-ER and to analyze the differences between psychiatric patients admitted to a medical ward with those admitted to the psychiatry unit and those who are discharged from the ER.

Method: Over a period of 3 years, psychiatric consultations requested by ER of ED physicians to the GH Psychiatric service were recorded by using a form to describe epidemiological and clinical data on the consultation process.

Violence in psychiatric units: a 7-year Italian study of persistently assaultive patients.

Background: The problem of violence and aggressive behaviour among patients with psychiatric disorders need careful assessment to improve the quality of psychiatric care. The aim of this paper is to describe the characteristics of repeated episodes of violence among patients admitted to an Italian psychiatric ward.

Methods: All violent behaviours, which occurred in a 15-bed psychiatric inpatient unit over a 7-year period, were assessed by using the Staff Observation Aggression scale (SOAS).

The Lindblom roller.

Neuropathic pain is caused by injury of the peripheral or central nervous system. The neurological examination of the sensory system in neuropathic pain patients guides the anatomical localization of the injury. Among the sensory modalities to be tested, priority should be given to those subserved by small peripheral sensory fibers or by the spinothalamic tract that most commonly are abnormal in neuropathic pain patients.

Lidocaine test in neuralgia.

Ten patients with organic nerve injury causing chronic neuropathic pain were tested for the effects of intravenous lidocaine versus saline upon psychophysical somatosensory variables. The variables assessed were the subjective magnitude of pain, area of mechanical hyperalgesia and presence and magnitude of thermal heat/cold hyperalgesia. The study methods applied to evaluate these conditions were the conventional testing of somatosensory submodalities with area mapping and the subjective magnitude estimation of spontaneous pain.