ABSTRACT
In recent years, clinical psychiatrists have shown a growing interest in mental health services research. The policy of de-institutionalisation, adopted under the assumption that the availability of extramural care would enable discharged patients to remain at home, thus avoiding prolonged hospitalisation, has tended to result in a running-down of many psychiatric institutions. This chapter aims to identify 'high risk' groups of patients who are prone to become chronically disabled and dependent, and thus to make possible a better allocation of resources in order to improve the outcome for such groups. There is likely to be a continuing change in the patterns of psychiatric care and also in the composition of the psychiatric inpatient population, since if the scale of inpatient provision does not increase to keep pace with the rising numbers of cases in the general population, the places available will probably be taken up to an increasing extent by the most severely disturbed and disabled types of patient.
