Psychiatric care in a general practice.

The morbidity and patient management in a small general practice in a suburb of Auckland was analysed over a period of three months, comparing medical and psychiatric cases. Psychiatric patients tend to be more often frmale, older (though not in the geriatric age group), make slightly greater demands on practice time and have somewhat more chronic illnesses, but these differences from medical patients are small and psychiatric patients do not form a major problem in practice in the community. The findings, while showing a slightly higher frequency of psychiatric patients, are otherwise comparable with those from other New Zealand studies.