KVC Health Systems

Mental health disorders account for around 1.8 million inpatient community hospital stays in the U.S.A. Our study aims to highlight the factors impacting the length of stay at a community hospital in the U.S.A. We reviewed 300 randomly selected charts to examine the factors impacting the length of stay in an adolescent inpatient psychiatric unit in 2011 and 2015. All data were analyzed in SPSS v. 20 with multiple regression analysis. Longer length of stay among adolescents was associated with multiple psychiatric diagnoses, co-occurring medical comorbidities, not living with biological parents, history of mental illness, legal problems, substance use in the family, seclusion, restraints during current admission, and schizophrenia. Longer length of stay among adolescents in a psychiatric inpatient unit was associated with severity of psychopathology, hospital parameters and family stability.