Psychosomatic Risk Screening in the Inpatient Care of Physically Ill Patients: a Feasibility Study

Mental health problems are common in terms of lifetime prevalence and often occur in combination with chronic physical illnesses. Mental comorbidities in physically ill patients lead to higher morbidity and mortality, greater demands on the healthcare system and higher treatment costs.

Among medical inpatients it can therefore be assumed that there is considerable mental comorbidity. In a large retrospective analysis of around 28,500 patient data sets from the Department of Internal Medicine at Heidelberg University Hospital, we could show that the length of stay in hospital for patients with mental comorbidity was extended by a total of 2 days when compared with patients who had no documented mental comorbidity. This effect was particularly pronounced in the case of major physical multimorbidity. In addition to previously documented psychiatric and psychosomatic diseases, there is a tremendous lack of recognition and diagnosis of relevant mental comorbidities. It has also been shown that other non-acute medical factors, such as functional limitations, impairment of activities of daily living, frailty, cognitive limitations or the lack of a receiving care facility, prolong the length of stay.

To address these problems in health care, some guidelines recommend systematic screening for mental and functional risk-factors, but still this has not been implemented in routine inpatient medical wards. The implementation of psychosomatic risk screening as part of the inpatient admission process could be suitable for detecting the need for psychosomatic and social service at an early stage and addressing it accordingly with psychotherapy, psychopharmacy and qualified social support. It may also be possible to reduce the length of stay in hospital. In this pilot project, a psychosocial risk screening with subsequent psychosomatic assessment by a consultant and introduction to social services is to be evaluated with regard to the feasibility of integration into ward procedures and acceptance by patients. The study is designed as a randomized feasibility study. Patients are included in the study on admission to a medical ward and randomly assigned to the intervention or the control group. The intervention group receives the screening and if necessary subsequent further care, the control group does not receive screening.

Screening focuses on previously defined psychosocial risk categories:

As part of the psychosomatic screening, the risk categories of sleep disorder and psychotropic drug use, depression, anxiety disorder, subjective disease burden, risky alcohol consumption, frailty and cognitive impairment are examined based on previous results.