Psychiatric inpatient care: where do we go from here?

The significant decline in the number of psychiatric hospital beds for more than two decades across Europe has changed the landscape of mental health services. This has rekindled debates about bed shortages and the reasons for variations in the number of inpatient beds, admissions to hospital and length of stay. Analysis of European Union (EU) level data shows that the UK has a relatively low number of admissions to hospital, yet a much higher than average length of stay compared with 12 other EU Member States. Understanding this is difficult, but recent studies shed some further light on the patterns and predictors of admissions and length of stay.