| Abstrakt: |
Summary This paper has shown that the spectacular growth in admissions to the civil state hospitals in New York State in recent years has been almost entirely due to: (1) the increased population of the state, (2) the development of treatment facilities for types of patients not previously treated in the hospitals, and (3) the large number of patients discharged from the hospitals after the introduction of the tranquilizing drugs. Many of these discharged patients have required rehospitalization and, as a consequence, in the past few years readmissions have constituted an increasingly larger proportion of all admissions. However, when the number of readmissions each year is related to a number of previously discharged patients through the use of a “readmission index,” rather than expressed in the traditional way as a percetage of total admissions, it is evident that ex-patients have not been returning to the hospitals in much greater numbers in the past few years than they had been previously, before the introduction of the tranquilizing drugs and the adoption of the “open door” policy. Programs should be established to help the discharged patient remain in the community and treatments should be developed which will either “cure” mental illnesses or bring about longer periods of remission. |
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