Pre-discharge factors predicting readmissions of psychiatric patients: a systematic review of the literature

BMC Psychiatry

Table 5 Synthesis of the main results regarding patients’ clinical history

Variables	Number of studies resulted significant/Number of studies analysing the variable	Main significant results^a (bivariate)	Main significant results^a (multivariate)
Previous admissions	32/37	Previous admissions risk factor (23)^b	Previous admissions risk factor (21)
Duration of illness	2/4	Higher length of illness risk factor (2)	No significant results
Age at onset	2/6	Mixed direction (2)	No significant results
Whether index admission corresponded to first onset/episode	1/2	First onset protective factor (1)	No significant results
Number of previous hospital days/average previous LoS	2/4	Number of previous hospital days risk factor (2)	Number of previous hospital days risk factor (1)
Previous use of health services	8/10	Increasing risk with service use (3)	Increasing risk with service use (8)

One paper with not significant results on age at first psychiatric admission was also found
^aThe number of significant results (when present) is reported in brackets for each variable. Please note that such numbers refer to the papers, and that more than one variable in the same row could be analysed in the same paper; moreover, not all studies conduct both bivariate and multivariate analysis
“Mixed direction” means that the variable resulted significant in more than one paper, but the results were contrasting
^bplus one with contrary result

ISSN: 1471-244X