Benchmarking psychiatric intensive care units (PICU) in a metropolitan area

Background With the deinstitutionalization of the last 30 years, psychiatric patients who where formerly housed and treated in large-scale mental hospitals in the country-side, were transferred to the cities and encouraged to rehabilitate and reintegrate in society, with the help of ambulatory psychiatric care and small-scale community admission units. In the same era, the number of compulsory admissions, and the turn-over on PICU's has steeply increased. The city of Amsterdam has six PICU's under the aegis of three distinct mental health care institutions. The nature and extent of differences in organizational structure, treatment policy and patient population between the units were largely unknown. The aim of this study was to evaluate the functioning of these units.