Mental health services in the family physician's office: a Canadian experiment.

This paper describes a program in Hamilton-Wentworth, Ontario, Canada, that brings mental health counselors and psychiatrists into the offices of 87 local family physicians, working in 35 practices serving 170,000 people. It outlines the organization of the mental health teams in the family physician's office and the way in which these teams are coordinated and discusses how this "shared care" approach can overcome many of the problems that …