Integrating psychosomatic care across medical settings and specialties

Psychosomatic medicine is THE multi-disciplinary arena where different medical specialties explore the interrelationship between bodily processes and social, psychological and psychiatric factors. Clinical courses of mental processes affecting medical outcomes and, vice versa, somatic processes influencing mental well-being constitute our main field of interest. Diverse clinical disciplines, ranging from medical psychology to psychiatry, neurology, internal medicine, surgery, including various somatic subspecialties, are involved in the effort to understand the physiological pathways in psychosomatic conditions and, at least in an ideal world, to advocate multi-disciplinary management.

However, integration of care (i.e., bringing together diverse specialty skills and expertise in complex cases of multi-morbidity simultaneously) still remains a difficult process in psychosomatics. Whereas the aspiration to integrate medical and mental health care is widespread, integrated care services are yet hard to find. In order to avoid unintended
negative outcomes due to under-detection of psychosomatic complexity or treatment refractoriness in fragmented mono-disciplinary trajectories, integration of care is deemed necessary at the hospital level between medical specialties and between the medical hospital and primary care.

The 2019 EAPM annual conference will provide lectures, symposia, workshops and master classes starting from different medical specialty perspectives on the pathophysiology and treatment of psychosomatic syndromes. In order to inform the field on current etiologic concepts another focus is on symptom formation and what constitutes to psychosomatic complexity. Furthermore, clinical efforts will be presented on when and where integrated
care could be delivered to foster a multi-disciplinary network approach, which may connect medical specialties across healthcare settings.

We hope to see you next year in Rotterdam!

On behalf of the conference committees,

Carsten Leue, EAPM-Conference President 2019

Department of Hospital Psychiatry and Medical Psychology,
Maastricht University Medical Centre, Maastricht, The Netherlands