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Severe Mental Illness Missed in a Quarter of General Hospital Admissions
Although the situation has improved, a quarter of general hospital admissions involving people with severe mental illness in 2017 failed to record a psychiatric condition, according to a study published online in PLOS Medicine. In 2006, severe mental diagnoses were overlooked in more than half of such cases.
“When someone is admitted to hospital, it’s important that the medical staff are aware of their other conditions, as these might affect what treatments are best for them, in order to provide holistic care,” said study corresponding author, Hassan Mansour, MSc, of the psychiatry department at University College London in the United Kingdom.
“We found encouraging signs that clinicians are more frequently identifying severe mental illnesses in hospital patients than they were a decade ago, but there’s a lot more that can be done, particularly to address disparities between ethnic groups, to ensure that everyone gets the best care available.”
The study focused on 45,706 general hospital admissions in England from 2006 to 2017 involving 13,786 adults with severe mental illness, such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. Researchers were interested in seeing how often previously diagnosed mental illnesses were recorded when patients were admitted for physical health issues.
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Upon hospitalization, mental illnesses were recorded 70% of the time across the entire study period, researchers reported. That rate rose from a mere 48% in 2006 to 75% in 2017.
When researchers looked for recordings of specific mental health diagnoses rather than any mention of psychiatric illness in general, recording of schizophrenia occurred for only 56% of people with the condition. Bipolar disorder was recorded for only 50% of patients with it.
The study also found that people from ethnic minorities, particularly from Black African or Caribbean backgrounds, were 38% more likely to have overlooked mental health diagnoses, compared with people from white ethnic backgrounds. People who were married, as well as those with better mental and physical health, were also more likely to have previous mental illness diagnoses go unrecorded.
“Knowing that a patient has a severe mental illness can be important for their treatment,” said study coauthor Christoph Mueller, MD, King’s College London, “as they might benefit from additional support after being discharged, and they may also need to continue taking their psychiatric medications, or even make changes to these, while in hospital.”
—Jolynn Tumolo
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