Overview

Consultation-liaison (C/L) psychiatrists are specialty trained physicians with expertise caring for patients with comorbid psychiatric and medical conditions. Consultation-liaison psychiatry is the newest subspecialty in psychiatry with its first certifying exam in 2005. The growth of the field (the major organization for the specialty has grown 55% in the past eight years) is related to the growing value health care systems are placing on effectively managing the behavioral health problems of large populations of patients seen in primary and specialty medical settings. 

There is good evidence that patients with any mental health or substance use disorder have two to three times higher health care costs than those without any such disorder. We also know that most behavioral health services, if given at all, are provided by primary care providers, namely family and internal medicine physicians. There is a growing need for psychiatrists who can work on and help lead multidisciplinary teams caring for patients in primary and specialty medical settings. That is a major training goal of the University of Iowa Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry Fellowship.

The primary training site for our C-L Fellowship is University of Iowa Health Care Medical Center. UI Health Care Medical Center is an 811-bed hospital that annually admits about 37,000 patients for inpatient hospital care. In fiscal year 2018, UI Health Care Medical Center had 58,000 emergency department visits and the system has more than 200 outpatient clinics and care areas and accommodated more than 1 million clinic visits at the main campus and community outreach clinics. UIHC offers services by physicians board certified in more than 200 specialties and in 2018 performed 665 organ and tissue transplants.

The clinical, educational, and research opportunities for residents and fellows in the University of Iowa Department of Psychiatry rival that of any major academic medical center in the country:

• Inpatient C-L psychiatry services at UI Health Care Medical Center
• Inpatient psychiatry services (UI Health Care Medical Center: 44 adult inpatient beds, 14 child beds, 15 geriatric beds, 15 Med/Psych beds)
• Assertive Community Treatment services
• Addiction services offering inpatient consults, partial hospitalization, intensive outpatient, outpatient, and medically assisted therapy services
• Inpatient and outpatient ECT
• Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation
• Developing ketamine services
• Women’s wellness psychiatry/psychology services
• Psych-oncology services
• Specialty inpatient and outpatient services for those with intellectual disabilities
• Neuropsychology and expert clinical psychologist services
• Clinical and research partnerships with the Iowa Neuroscience Institute, Iowa Neuroimaging Consortium, and Huntington’s Disease Center of Excellence