Selected Presentations & Appearances
Outreach & Engaged Scholarship
Primary Theme: Brain & Society
The worldwide economic burden associated with caring for patients with schizophrenia has doubled in the last 10 years, from $62.7 billion in 2002 to $155.7 billion in recent years. Direct healthcare costs (inpatient care, emergency visits, medication costs and long-term care) account for 22-24% of all healthcare expenditures. Patients with schizophrenia are high utilizers of emergency department (ED) services because of relapse, which may be caused by psychoactive substance use, not taking medications as prescribed and/or lack of efficacy of interventions. These patients frequently need inpatient care, but insufficient resources lead to a situation in which patients are often kept in the ED until the crisis resolves, the substances dissipate from their system, interventions take effect or an inpatient bed becomes available.
Service to the Profession
The Association of Medicine and Psychiatry (AMP) was founded in 1991 by physicians concerned about the care of patients at the interface of medicine and psychiatry. The Association is an interdisciplinary clinical and scientific group which promotes high quality patient care for those with combined illness, develops guidelines for services and training experiences specifically designed to address the problems of these patients, and fosters basic and clinical research in this area.
The principal objective of the Association is to enhance the care of patients with concurrent physical and neuropsychiatric disorders through teaching, the development of clinical services and research.