The outpatient consultation assumes a role of extreme importance in any Department of Psychiatry and Mental Health. The activities developed in the consultation are based on the promotion of patient's empowerment and the maintenance of balance and integration individual/environment.

The authors propose to analyze and characterize a sample of patients treated in a General Psychiatry Consultation at Hospital de São João, Oporto, Portugal, in order to improve the quality of the provided service.

It was selected a sample of 168 patients consulted between October 2008 and September 2009, having the authors proceeded to the correlation of variables as gender, age, diagnosis, follow-up in consultation, affluence to the Psychiatry's Emergency Service and number of hospitalizations at the Psychiatry's Department in the last three years.

The selected sample is majorly composed by women above the 30 years old. Compared to the patients with neurotic, anxious, affective and personality disorders, the ones with psychotic disturbances require a more regular follow-up in consultation and a superior need of hospitalizations. Curiously, the patients with personality disturbances are the ones who occur to the Psychiatry's Emergency Service more frequently.