Background
There is a growing recognition of the need to address the poor physical health of people with mental illness. Multimorbidity is associated with increased use of health services and presents a challenge for clinicians and other service providers. Epidemiological evidence consistently shows that people with mental illness have higher rates of physical comorbidity, particularly those of cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. The high rate of physical comorbidity significantly reduces the life expectancy among people with mental illness who dye on average 10-15 years earlier than the general population. Consequently, people with combined mental and physical comorbidity have increased re-admission rates, higher hospital and total health sector costs than people without mental illness.
Method
This study is a retrospective cross-sectional analysis based on discharge data from an Australian Mental Health Unit Details of physical comorbidities and mental health will be extracted from the hospital discharge data for a 10-year period.
Results
The prevalence of physical health problems in participants and across different mental disorders will be reported using descriptive statistics as means and standard deviations or number and percentages as appropriate.
Conclusions
By quantifying specific physical health conditions across a range of psychiatric diagnoses, this analysis is expected to establish a prioritisation list of physical health problems in patients with different mental illnesses based on their disease and treatment burden and inform the coordination of care across the whole of hospital service and identify needs for referral pathways with other outpatient community and public health services.