A research design to predict required length of psychiatric hospital stay

It is often an important clinical task to predict how long a given patient will need to be hospitalized, but past research efforts to provide an empirical basis for such predictions have not been highly successful. The authors propose a conceptual model for predicting length of stay that goes beyond previous research; they not only include a range of traditionally employed patient characteristics but also take into account the nature of the treatment goals and the availability of post-hospital treatment resources. The model forms the basis for an objective prediction procedure which will be tested in a large-scale research project on long-term hospital treatment outcome.