Child and adolescent Liaison-Consultation Psychiatry and Psychosomatic Medicine in a Clinical-Teaching Hospital.

Psychosomatic medicine explores the psychological, behavioral, and social elements that influence people's health and quality of life. This discipline develops skills and knowledge used in the evalua tion and management of psychosocial elements interfering in the process of illness and healing. The Child and Adolescent Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry (CACLP) is a discipline that has been empi rically installed in order to favor adherence to treatments and recovery of children and teenagers du ring the process of illness. There is a need for developing this discipline in Chile, but so far there are limited national and international records and literature dedicated to it. The objective of this article is to update the concepts of structure and describe how a CACLP unit in a high complexity teaching hospital works in general, discussing the clinical challenges involved in these issues.