Geriatric medicine and old age psychiatry joint training pre-feasibility pilot study: an innovative approach to collaborative postgraduate training.

Background: Physical and psychological health problems are prevalent in older adults and rarely exist in isolation. Treating these problems in isolation is resourceful and can be potentially harmful to patients due to delays in diagnosis and treatment and incomplete holistic care plans. Historically, trainees in geriatric medicine and old age psychiatry within the United Kingdom have completed very different training programmes.

Completed audit cycle to explore the use of the STOPP/START toolkit to optimise medication in psychiatric in-patients with dementia.

Unlabelled: Aims and method To explore the use of the STOPP/START toolkit in older psychiatric in-patients with dementia. Clinical records and current drug charts were reviewed against STOPP/START criteria for all in-patients (n = 86) on six specialist dementia wards.

Results: Benzodiazepines, antipsychotics and opiates were most commonly prescribed inappropriately.

Buprenorphine augmentation in the treatment of refractory obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Background: OCD is often refractory to treatment. There is a need for the development of new, non-invasive treatments for severe OCD.

Rationale: There is evidence that opiates can be a useful adjunctive treatment in OCD.

Musical hallucinations in normal children and adult non-psychiatric population.

A descriptive account of musical hallucinations of a series of 19 people is presented. Five people reported the onset of hallucination before adulthood. In this paper we demonstrate that musical hallucinations are not necessarily pathological and can occur as a normal experience in people (children and adults) who have no contact with mental health services and no concurrent mental disorder.

Hymns and arias: musical hallucinations in older people in Wales.

This is a phenomenological study of 30 consecutive referrals of older people with musical hallucinations concentrating on the names of the melodies heard. Hymns and Christmas carols were the most common experience with 'Abide with Me' particularly frequent.