Proactive Psychiatric Consultation For Hospitalized Patients, A Plan for the Future

The Yale Behavioral Intervention Team (BIT) is a proactive, multi-disciplinary psychiatric consultation service for all internal medicine inpatients at Yale-New Haven Hospital. The goal of the team, which includes nurses, social workers, and psychiatrists, is to shift from a “reactive” to a “proactive” paradigm of psychiatric consultations on hospital inpatient medical floors. The team screens for, identifies, and removes/mitigates behavioral barriers to the effective receipt of health care among hospitalized medical patients, especially among those with co-occurring mental illness and/or substance abuse. To facilitate delivery of timely, effective inpatient medical care, the BIT collaborates closely with the medical team through formal and informal advice, co-management of behavioral issues, education of medical, nursing, and social work staff, and direct care of complex behaviorally disordered patients. The team also assists the primary medical treatment team as needed with transitions to the next level of care involving behavioral health services. Standard “Reactive” Psychiatric Consultation Challenges We implemented this change in our psychiatric consultation service paradigm because the standard “reactive” psychiatric consultation paradigm was not as effective as all the stakeholders wanted and needed. The Behavioral Intervention Team was created to address the following challenges to the hospital’s provision of care to medical patients with co-...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - Category: Health Management Authors: Tags: Hospitals Innovations in Care Delivery Organization and Delivery Behavioral Health Behavioral Intervention Team Mental Health Nursing Patient Care Psychiatry Social Work Source Type: blogs