Preliminary Results of Psychiatric Inpatients Referred to an Addiction Medicine Consult Service

The paper by Priest and McCarty (2018) provides valuable insights into addiction medicine consult services (AMCS) and the care delivered to hospitalized individuals with substance use disorders (SUD). We commend the authors for this and also wish to illuminate further on this topic. As part of a larger quality improvement initiative focused on the acute inpatient psychiatric units, we retrospectively examined the medical records of patients admitted to acute inpatient psychiatric units at St. Paul’s Hospital, an inner-city hospital, in Vancouver, British Columbia, who had been referred to the AMCS. It consisted of certified addiction specialist physicians, interdisciplinary trainees and fellows, a clinical nurse educator, and two social workers, one whom provides dedicated support to psychiatric inpatients.