Am J Psychiatry 1975; 132:22-27
Copyright © 1975 by American Psychiatric Association
Utilization review of treatment for suicide attempters
L Kirstein, B Prusoff, M Weissman and DM Dressler
Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut 06508.
The authors describe an effort to develop criteria for utilization review
of treatment for suicide attempters. Explicit criteria proposed by a panel
of experts as essential determinants for hospitalization of these patients
were compared with actual clinical practice. It was found that according to
the experts' criteria (which were operationalized into rating assessments),
over half of the outpatient sample should have been hospitalized. After
multiple regression analysis was carried out on the criteria, however, four
predictors showed that only 20 percent of the outpatients should have been
hospitalized. The authors discuss the issues these findings raise about the
criteria of the experts, their utility for research, their validity, and
their implications for utilization review.
