This book offers mental health guidelines for all medical professionals facing the emerging challenges presented by an aging population worldwide.  The text acknowledges that as the geriatric demographic grows, limited resources and infrastructures demand quality protocols to deliver inpatient geriatric psychiatric care, and that many physicians may not be trained to address these specific needs.  This text fills this gap with guidelines assessing, diagnosing, and treating aging patients as they present in the emergency room and other settings.

 

Unlike any other text, this book focuses on how to optimize the use of the inpatient setting by recommending evaluations and treatments, and offering flow-charts and figures of key points, to guide both general workup and continued evaluation and treatment. This approach aims to minimize instances of premature release or readmissions and to improve outcomes.  

 

Chapters cover the various issues that clinicians face when working with an older patient, including legal topics, limitations to treatment, prescription-related complications, patients struggling with substance abuse, and various behavioral concerns. Written by experts in the field, the text takes a multidisciplinary approach to deliver high-quality care as needs of the aging population evolve.

 

Inpatient Geriatric Psychiatry is a vital resource for all clinicians working with an aging population, including geriatricians, psychiatrists, neurologists, primary care providers, hospitalists, psychologists, neuropsychologists, emergency room and geriatric nurses, social workers, and trainees.

 

 

Essential medical work-up and rule-outs

Neuropsychological assessment
Pharmacological overview in geriatrics: pharmacodynamics, pharmacokinetics, laboratory
Interdisciplinary roles and interface
Legal Aspects of Inpatient Geriatric Psychiatry
Major Neurocognitive Disorder with Behavioral Disturbance
Acute medical events: falls, seizures, CVAs, urinary retention, cardiac events, hypotension, SIADH, dehydration, infection
Suicide in the geriatric population: risk factors, identification, and management
Sleep in Geriatric Psychiatry Inpatients
Alcohol and Substance Use Disorders in the Geriatric Psychiatry Inpatient: Acute Treatment, Detoxification, Withdrawal
Psychiatric symptoms co-morbid with neurological syndromes
Delirium: risk factors, contributors, identification, work-up, and treatment
Involuntary treatment: medications, forced feeding, restraints, prevention of wandering
Pain management
Special syndromes: Serotonin Syndrome (SS), Neuroleptic Malignant Syndrome (NMS), and  Catatonia
Neuromodulation interventions: ECT, rTMS: work-up, preparation and post-treatment care + ketamine in inpatient psychiatry
Medication strategies: Switching, tapering, cross-over, overmedication, drug-drug interactions, discontinuation syndromes
Psychotherapies and non-pharmacological interventions
Medical nursing care and communication barrier
Telemedicine and IT --use of digital technology on inpatient units
Placement, coordination, follow-up.