The legal requirement to use least restrictive interventions in emergency psychiatric treatment does not stipulate whether physical restraints or medication is least restrictive. There is no current consensus about how to determine least restrictive interventions in a generalizable manner. In this study patients who were clients in a public psychiatric emergency service were anonymously surveye...

Aggressive behaviour by psychiatric patients is a serious issue in clinical practice, and adequate management of such behaviour is required, with careful evaluation of the factors causing the aggression. To examine the characteristics of aggressive incidents by ward type, a cross-sectional descriptive study was conducted for 6 months between April 2012 and June 2013 using the Staff Observation ...

OBJECTIVES To examine the effect of routinely administered psychiatric questionnaires on the recognition, management, and outcome of psychiatric disorders in non-psychiatric settings. DATA SOURCES Embase, Medline, PsycLIT, Cinahl, Cochrane Controlled Trials Register, and hand searches of key journals. METHODS A systematic review of randomised controlled trials of the administration and rout...

AIMS The aim of this review was to assess whether restraint and seclusion are safe and effective interventions for the short-term management of disturbed/violent behaviour. Staff and service user perspectives on the use of these interventions were also considered. The review was undertaken as part of the development process for a national guideline on the short-term management of disturbed/viol...

STUDY OBJECTIVE Emergency department (ED) care for patients with psychiatric complaints has become increasingly challenging given recent nationwide declines in available inpatient psychiatric beds. This creates pressure to manage psychiatric patients in the ED or as outpatients and may place providers and institutions at risk for liability under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EM...

BACKGROUND Associations between human behaviour and psychiatric decompensation and weather variables have been inconsistent. OBJECTIVES We studied the association of certain weather variables (specifically, humidity, wind speed, and barometric pressure) with emergent psychiatric presentations, psychiatric admissions, incidence of violent crimes, and suicides in a metropolitan area. METHOD W...

Because the mental health care system in California is fragmented and chronically under-funded, the burden of psychiatric care has predictably fallen on emergency physicians. Community mental health resources and funding have decreased steadily over recent years, with the number of acute inpatient psychiatric beds per capita decreasing by over 30% since 1995.1 In 1995, there were over 9,000 acu...

People with psychiatric problems often visit a general hospital. Many of them require emergency service. B P Koirala Institute of Health Sciences (BPKIHS) is one of the few health institutes in Nepal providing comprehensive 24-hour psychiatric emergency service. This study aims to document the pattern of psychiatric emergencies in a tertiary care hospital of Eastern Nepal. All psychiatric emerg...