[Can outpatient measures prevent inpatient admission?]

During the last decades the focus of psychiatric care has shifted from hospital to the "community". As the philosophy of deinstitutionalisation implies that community mental health care is preferable to hospital care and that treatment functions may be performed equally well or even better outside a hospital, one of the main objectives of community-based care consisted in preventing hospital readmission. Despite many objections readmission data and length of stay become most popular as outcome criteria in the evaluation of treatment measures. However, until today evaluative research has failed to demonstrate the overall effectiveness in preventing inpatient treatment. This is mainly due to the fact that the complexity of the research topic could not be adequately modelled and controlled in observational studies as the main source of information.