Past Issues

Background: The “revolving-door” patients have become a challenge for psychiatric care because of the high cost of repeated hospitalizations. The re-hos-pitalization rate in Taiwan is estimated at 6.1%, 22.3%, and 37.8% in periods of “less than 14 days,” “one year,” and “five years” after discharge, respectively. But, a direct comparison of re-hospitalization rates for patients with schizophrenia and affective disorders and the associated risk factors in Taiwan is still lacking. We conducted a retrospective study evaluating the re-hospitalization rate and associ-ated risk factors for patients with schizophrenia or affective disorders in southern Taiwan. Methods: We recruited subjects with a diagnosis of schizophrenia or af-fective disorder, who were discharged in 2007, from the acute ward of one local mental hospital and follow-up. Results: We recruited 267 subjects (142 subjects with schizophrenia and 125 subjects with affective disorder). The re-hospitaliza-tion rates in a one-year follow-up were 37.3% and 39.2% for patients with schizo-phrenia and affective disorder, respectively. No significant differences were found in the “time to re-hospitalization” between the two diagnostic groups. In addition, we found that patients with rehospitalization had significantly greater number of previous hospitalizations (p < 0.01) and significantly shorter length of illness (p < 0.01). The re-hospitalized patients were younger significantly (p< 0.05), had a significantly shorter length of illness (p < 0.05), and significantly more previous hospitalizations (p < 0.05) than the non-re-hospitalized patients. Discussion: Our main finding in this study was that no significant difference was found in the “time to re-hospitalization” within one year. Those with a shorter length of illness and more previous hospitalizations had a higher risk of re-hospitalization.