Evaluation of a Barriers to Discharge Screening in a Mental Health Impatient Unit

BACKGROUND: People admitted to inpatient mental health units have a variety of social problems such as homelessness, lack of funding or poor social support. This can be reflected in longer length of stay. The goal of the study is to assess the predictive validity of the Barriers to Discharge questionnaire scores on length of stay in a Mental Health inpatient unit . METHODS: Two thousand three hundred fifty-five inpatients were analyzed with a mean age of 38.9 +/- 16.0 years, 51% were male and the mean log of length of stay in days was 1.23 +/- 1.11. The barrier to discharge score continuous variable was transformed in categorical variable, and the categories were fixed as follows: 0-121 points: low risk; 122-199 points: medium-low risk; 200-274 points: medium-high risk; 275-817 points high risk, according to the definition of the creators of the questionnaire. A multiple linear regression model was used with log of Length of stay in days as dependent variable. RESULTS: People belonging to the "low risk" category showed a significantly lower length of stay compared to the other higher risk categories. CONCLUSIONS: The Barriers to Discharge tool, although promising, needs to be tested in other contexts and using mental health diagnosis as variable, to see whether it can be a useful predictor of severity of people suffering from mental problems, which is reflected in the length of stay in an inpatient unit.