What is it about?
We analysed 20 years of inpatient admissions records and found five patterns that recurrently admitted patients tend to follow. Using these insights, hospitals and clinicians can be better equipped to predict and prevent unnecessary readmissions to psychiatric inpatient care.
Featured Image
Photo by Wes Hicks on Unsplash
Why is it important?
While most research focuses on whether or not patients will have a subsequent early readmission, by expanding our scope, we identified five distinct long-term patterns through which patients tend to readmit over time. This opens avenues to better understand and predict how, when, and why certain patients may return to care, and the development of targeted interventions to prevent unnecessary readmissions.
Perspectives
This is my first publication which marks the beginning of a sustained research focus on improving psychiatric care outcomes. I am especially passionate about this work as reducing avoidable psychiatric readmissions is one of the rare goals where patients, clinicians, hospitals, and health systems all benefit from the same outcome. Preventing unnecessary readmissions supports more stable recovery for patients, sustains clinician optimism, enables more efficient use of mental health resources, and reduces unnecessary costs for patients and insurers. More broadly, I hope this research encourages a shift from viewing readmissions as isolated events to understanding the longer-term patterns of care they reflect.
Ruby Ross
University of Western Australia
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Uncovering Psychiatric Readmission Patterns to Guide Hospital Practices, Psychiatric Services, February 2026, American Psychiatric Association,
DOI: 10.1176/appi.ps.20250132.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
