Psychiatric In-patients and Out-patients in a London Borough

Little has been published about psychiatric out-patient work, and even less about the relationship between in-patient and out-patient psychiatric facilities in service requirements for a given population. The reasons for this are partly general to the whole field of medicine —a preoccupation with severe illness and the hospital bed to which it inevitably leads— and partly particular to psychiatry. The growth of out-patient psychiatric work is relatively recent, and its existence outside teaching hospitals is largely a National Health Service development. With in-patients concentrated in large mental hospitals serving an extensive area, the psychiatrist's connection with any individual general hospital was necessarily limited and the out-patients a small and peripheral part of his work.