BACKGROUND Agitation and containment are frequent in psychiatric care but little is known about their costs. The aim was to evaluate the use of services and costs related to agitation and containment of adult patients admitted to a psychiatric hospital or emergency service. METHODS Systematic searches of four electronic databases covering the period January 1998-January 2014 were conducted. M...

BACKGROUND Psychiatric services have undergone profound changes over the last decades. CEPHOS-LINK is an EU-funded study project with the aim to compare readmission of patients discharged with psychiatric diagnoses using a registry-based observational record linkage study design and to analyse differences in the findings for five different countries. A range of different approaches is available...

OBJECTIVE This study examined the impact of using various archival sources of violence data on the recorded base rate of violence and on the accuracy of violence risk assessments in a sample of civil psychiatric patients. METHOD Violence in the community, after release from involuntary hospitalization, was measured with 3 types of archival data: criminal records, psychiatric hospital readmiss...

This report examines the hospital stay of psychiatric in-patients in a general hospital psychiatric setting.The hospital stay days, psychiatric diagnosis, outcome, number of re-admission and some socio-demographic details of patients admitted during one year period were recorded and analysed. The mean hospital stay was 29.39 ± 20.43 days. 60% patients stayed less than 4 weeks. The mean hospital...

The gap in Kenya between need and treatment for mental disorders is wide, and private providers are increasingly offering services, funded in part by private health insurance (PHI). Chiromo, a 30-bed psychiatric hospital in Nairobi, forms part of one of the largest private psychiatric providers in East Africa. The study evaluated the effects of insurance on service use and charge, questioning i...

OBJECTIVES Deinstitutionalisation and shortage of psychiatric beds worldwide has led to extensive research into the risk factors and interventions associated with rapid and recurrent admission to hospital. Little research of this nature has taken place in South Africa, particularly with regard to acute hospital admissions. This study attempted primarily to assess the effect of length of stay an...