Acute psychiatric admissions from an out-of-hours Casualty Clinic; how do referring doctors and admitting specialists agree?

摘要

BackgroundOver the last decades there has been an increasing pressure on the acute psychiatric wards in Norway. The major contributor to psychiatric acute admissions at the University Hospital of North Norway in the city of Tromsø in 2001 was the GP-based Tromsø Casualty Clinic, only open out-of-hours. We explored all acute psychiatric referrals from Tromsø Casualty Clinic in 2001. The purpose of the study was to characterize the admissions and assess the agreement between the referring doctors and the hospital specialists according to the need for hospitalization, agreement on application of the law and the diagnostic evaluation to assess whether the admissions were appropriate.