Efficiency of Mental Hospitals.

Civilized communities spend much of their resources on the care of the sick. In present-day Britain nearly half the hospital beds are occupied by the mentally ill, so that even a small improvement in the treatment of these patients will be profitable, both in alleviating suffering and in reducing the burden on the community. In the work reported here, we have adopted certain criteria by which to judge efficiency of treatment, and then we have analysed the data available in order to determine which factors are important for it.