Surveying Child and Adolescent Inpatient Psychiatric Units: Demographics, Policies, and Practice

The increasing demand for acute inpatient psychiatric unit (IPU) treatment for children and adolescents in recent years has put significant pressure on hospital systems to provide efficient and effective care. However, there is a gap in the literature regarding the characteristics of IPU care for children and adolescents in the US, making it difficult for institutions to benchmark their performance against nationwide standards or understand generalizability of existing research.

To address this gap in the literature by beginning to collect descriptive data on significant variables for youth care from a geographically and institutionally diverse group of on Child and Adolescent IPUs.

A multi-institutional research team conducted a nationwide (US) survey of child and adolescent IPU clinicians using snowball sampling. Recruitment emails were sent to IPU groups in the American Psychological Association and the American Academy Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

The study yielded data from 12 institutions with a total of 20 IPUs, representing over 23,000 admissions in the years 2019 and 2020. The results of the survey show wide variability in institutional definitions of key variables (such as readmissions and safety events) as well as large ranges in length of stay, restraints, seclusions, and safety events.

This study reveals the importance of IPU clinical researchers taking steps to build a robust evidence base for IPU care, including developing consensus definitions of key variables and conceptualizing why high degrees of variability exist in important variables of IPU care. The survey results provide valuable insights for hospital systems, policymakers, and clinicians in the field of child and adolescent psychiatry.