There is increasing interest on extending liaison psychiatry to primary care, for the management of long-term medical conditions such as diabetes mellitus.
An evaluation of the Rapid Assessment, Interface and Discharge (RAID) model of liaison psychiatry—employed at City Hospital, Birmingham—estimated that the service saved between 43 and 64 beds per day through reduced lengths of stay and prevention of readmission.
At the beginning of the 19th century Johann Christian Reil created the term psychiatry whilst the polymath Benjamin Rush wrote Diseases of the Mind.
Under the guidance of Alan Gregg, psychoanalysis impacted on hospital medicine through figures such as Franz Alexander, Stanley Cobb and Felix Deutsch.
The publishing of two texts A Handbook of Elementary Psychobiology and Psychiatry, by Billings, and Psychosomatic Medicine, by Edward Weiss and O. Spurgeon English, outlined the theoretical foundations for the developing field.
George L. Engel was involved in the development of liaison psychiatry and coined the term biopsychosocial model which overcame divisions created by Cartesian mind-body dualism and was to have wider repercussions on psychiatric practice.