Discharging Elderly Patients from a Psychiatric Hospital

The community is able to tolerate discharged psychogeriatric patients by virtue of a reaction between the resources which it has to offer and the behavioural abnormalities which the discharged patient presents. Therefore, in order to maximize the potential for community care, an attempt was made to identify those factors in the community or in the patient which favoured or militated against survival in the community. It was found that only females and those patients with a diagnosis of depression showed a significant increase in their chances of re-hospitalization. No factors were found to be associated with an ability to stay outside hospital.