Towards an Understanding of Acute Psychiatric Hospitalization: Factors Associated with Early Readmission

Carol Min Jin Cho, Fordham University

Abstract

The primary purpose of this study was to investigate factors associated with early psychiatric readmission in order to develop a risk index to identify individuals at risk of early readmission. A secondary aim was to determine the impact of therapy engagement on early psychiatric readmissions. This study was conducted based on a dataset of 793 individuals who were discharged from one of two inpatient psychiatry units from a public hospital in a metropolitan area in the Northeast between January 1 and December 31, 2018. Three admission status groups were identified for comparison: early readmit (n = 57), late readmit (n = 48), and nonreadmit (n = 688). A multiple logistic regression analysis was conducted to determine the best fitting model composed of sociodemographic, health service use, and index hospitalization variables. In addition, the impact of therapy engagement during the index hospitalization on admission status (e.g., early readmit) was assessed. A final predictive model included six variables: emergency service use, primary diagnosis, auxiliary diagnoses (i.e., medical, substance use, other), and length of stay (c-statistic = .773), which was then converted to an early readmission risk index (c-statistic = .749). An assessment of therapy engagement between admission groups found that the nonreadmit group engaged at the highest rate in comparison to the readmit groups, F(2, 76.93) = 4.501, p = .014. Clinical implications of the findings, limitations, directions for future research, and ethical considerations are discussed.

Subject Area

Counseling Psychology|Clinical psychology

Recommended Citation

Cho, Carol Min Jin, "Towards an Understanding of Acute Psychiatric Hospitalization: Factors Associated with Early Readmission" (2021). ETD Collection for Fordham University. AAI28548135.
https://research.library.fordham.edu/dissertations/AAI28548135

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