PROBLEMS IN ESTABLISHING AND MAINTAINING PSYCHIATRIC UNITS IN GENERAL HOSPITALS
A. E. BENNETT M.D.1
1 The A. E. Bennett Neuropsychiatric Research Foundation, Department of Psychiatry, University of California Medical School, San Francisco, and Herrick Memorial Hospital, Berkeley, Calif.
Any hospital interested in planning a psychiatric unit could obtain from the administration of any one of these hospitals or the chief of psychiatry, complete information which could be used to reassure the hospital medical staff and lay board. The establishment of a psychiatric unit is completely feasible and it can be operated successfully with a minimal difficulty to the hospital.
It is our responsibility to educate all concerned with the management of general hospitals that these units increase the institution's usefulness and value to the community, enrich its training program for interns, nurses and staff doctors, and open up new research vistas. Besides all this, the hospital becomes truly a general hospital, a term misnomer as long as it excludes one of the commonest of all disorders.
The facetious remark that what America needs is a good five dollar psychiatrist should be interpreted as a challenge. All general hospitals from now on must prepare to take over complete treatment of acute mental illness. All psychiatrists should become crusaders and move into general hospitals to take their proper role in this new era of medicine.
