Unplanned Readmission | Literature Review

Running head: UNPLANNED READMISSION
UNPLANNED READMISSION
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LITERATURE REVIEW
In the mental health system of Australia, community care is a very integral part of heath
servicing. Broadly, the mental health services in Australia are based on the type of settings,
the client or rather the subject is receiving the care. Institutionalization and
deinstitutionalization are the various service protocols through which the patient influx and
efflux are controlled in the Australian mental health system (Duhig, Gunasekara & Patterson
2017). The subjects who are mildly to moderately ill are delivered with the care services in
the community settings only thus helping them receive a cost effective care at the comfort of
their home and environment. But when a subject is severely ill due to severe mental health or
a neuropsychological condition, it is important to have him or her institutionalized as soon as
possible, in order to manage the symptoms without any further complications or
deteriorations (Ose et al., 2018). While it is absolutely critical to address the symptoms and
signs of the mental health disorder and condition in the hospital with a collaborative and
effective multidisciplinary team effort that would aid in faster recovery of the subject. It is
important to note that the faster recovery of the patient leads to more satisfaction in the
patient and his family and always an effective care means less chances of relapse of the
mental health condition or symptoms again that would prevent the chances of readmission
once. Planned admissions are situations when a person is aware of the symptoms or the
members of the family are cognizant of the gradually, anticipated deteriorating health
condition of the subject thus, helping the subject gets into an institution in a planned,
organized manner (Moore, Moonie & Anderson, 2019). More importantly, in a planned
admission of the patient in the mental health institution, the patient is voluntarily willing to
take the admission. But there are situations, very adverse of course, where the subject faces
an sudden, rapid and unexpected mental health signs and symptoms that are severe and has
uncontrollable episodes of precipitation and these are the situations where the family of the

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subject along with the subject himself is completely unprepared to think and address the exact
needs of the situation in a very planned manner. Hence, the subjects with sudden and severe
symptoms of mental health disorder are taken to the nearby hospital, which is followed by an
unplanned admission. Unplanned admission has various disadvantages such as lack of cost
ineffectiveness, lack of proper health care planning as the interventions has to be begun there
and then immediately, thus addressing the acute needs of the situation. Hence unplanned
admission of the patient to the mental health institution makes the situation complicated and
the consequent unplanned service delivery often lead to various complications with the
recovery process due to the possible lack of the quality of the care, being delivered. The
unplanned admission of the patient also increases the various aspects of other problems as
well such as more consumption of bed and care facilities, decrease in the bed availability to
the other patients, increase in the expenditure of the facility. When, the unplanned admissions
are not treated properly, the recovery rate is poor and at times, they have to be discharged to
prioritize the other planned admissions who are waiting in the queue. Discharge without
proper recovery of the subject leads to more issues with the hospital readmissions, that is not
only costly for the hospital but for the patient and his family as well. The number of
unplanned hospital admissions, are increasing in the Australian mental health system. And it
is very difficult to manage the situation.
Li et al., (2018) aimed to study ‘Emergency department presentation and readmission
after index psychiatric admission: a data linkage study’ and finds out important correlation
between the acute mental health treatment being undertaken in the hospitals of Australia and
the reason behind the readmission of the mental health subjects in the respective departments.
The researchers of the study performed a cohort study with the data sets that linked the
government level public health data regarding unplanned readmission of the psychiatric
patients (Kalseth et al., 2016).. The researchers of the study found out the rates and