Preventing involuntary admissions: special needs for distinct patient groups

BACKGROUND: Coercive measures in psychiatry are a controversial topic and raise ethical, legal and clinical issues. Involuntary admission of patients is a long-lasting problem and indicates a problematic pathway to care situations within the community, largely because personal freedom is fundamentally covered by the UN declaration of human rights and the German constitution. METHODS: In this study, a survey on a large and comprehensive population of psychiatric in-patients in the eastern part of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, was carried out for the years 2004–2009, including 230.678 treatment cases. The data were collected from the dataset transferred to health insurance automatically, which, since 2004 is available in an electronic form. In addition, a wide variety of information on treatment, sociodemographic and illness-related factors were collected and analysed. Data were collected retrospectively and analyses were calculated using statistical software (IBM SPSS Statistics 19.0(®)). Quantitative data are presented as mean and standard deviation. Due to the unequal group sizes, group differences were calculated by means of Chi-square tests or independent sample t tests. A Bonferroni correction was applied to control for multiple comparisons. RESULTS: We found an over-representation of involuntary admissions in young men (<21 years) suffering from schizophrenia and in female patients aged over 60 with a diagnosis of dementia. Most of our results are concordant with the previous literature. Also admission in hours out of regular out-patient services elevated the risk. CONCLUSION: The main conclusion from these findings is a need for a fortification of ambulatory treatment offers, e.g. sociopsychiatric services or ward round at home for early diagnosis and intervention. Further prospective studyies are needed.