What is it about?

This article deals with how psychiatric patients are treated in our general hospital. In addition, it points to the need to implement improvements in medical training, as well as the difficulties of being able to discharge patients without family references, proposing some strategies that all health professionals should be aware of to be able to find references for abandoned patients in general hospital beds.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

In large urban centers, especially those with tourist attractions, patients may be taken to emergency services in hospitals, without documents, without references and with acute psychiatric illnesses, which can prevent them from providing personal data and family and family references. treatment, which would make it possible to find help more quickly and facilitate hospital discharge. It turns out that it's not always simple. We decided to write this article in an attempt to make health professionals aware of some strategies that we use in our daily practice, when we come across patients without family or friends references, so that we can safely return them to family life.

Perspectives

This topic had been bothering us for a long time, so we decided to write about it. Every health professional must know how to find references for patients without identification, how and where to seek help to shorten the length of stay for those patients without documents and without a history of passage in that health unit. We brought some strategies that we use in our hospital to solve difficult cases from a social point of view, from the perspective that is not learned in the classroom, but that daily practice and creativity teach us daily.

M.D. Pablo E. P. Dutra
Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: If it's not anyone's, it's ours. The exit door and its crossroads in the Brazilian health system, Ethics Medicine and Public Health, March 2021, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.jemep.2020.100616.
You can read the full text:

Read

Contributors

The following have contributed to this page