The Mental Health Team on a Burn Unit

The usual methods of psychiatric consultation in a medical-surgical ICU setting were found to be inadequate to deal with the complexly interrelated issues of patients' emotional reactions to severe injury and the simultaneous stresses on the staff who care for such critically ill patients. A new approach to consultation/liaison in this setting, a multidisciplinary mental health team, is described and illustrated to demonstrate a more effective model for dealing with a patient-staff system under chronic high stress.