The nature of out of hours admissions to a general psychiatric hospital

Abstract

The organisation of psychiatric emergency services varies widely in the UK. These can usefully be viewed as a spectrum. At one end are traditional services where the GP acts as the primary filter to admissions. At the other extreme are crisis intervention teams aimed at managing the patient in the community. Somewhere along this spectrum of service provision lie the emergency walk-in clinics. There have been few studies on how effective these different arrangements are.