Key Takeaways
Extended Takeaways
- Across 20 South Australian public hospitals, 25,610 mental health patients accounted for 86,740 ED and inpatient episodes over January 1, 2014, to December 31, 2019, underscoring how recurrent presentation patterns can be tracked using routine hospital data for service planning.
- Approximately 4% of mental health patients were discharged from an ED or inpatient admission with a primary diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, a figure the authors note may underestimate true burden because self-harm and adjustment disorder presentations can mask co-occurring borderline personality disorder.
- Patients presenting with self-harm had a significantly higher risk of hospital re-presentation than those with self-harm/adjustment disorder in both male and female groups (P < .001), suggesting clinicians should avoid treating these categories as equivalent when assessing near-term utilization risk.
- For borderline personality disorder, the mean time to a second ED and/or inpatient admission was 199 days with LOS < 2 days, 179 days with LOS 2–7 days, 179 days with LOS 8–14 days, and 142 days with LOS > 14 days, with no other contrasts reaching statistical significance.
- In other personality disorders, the mean time to a second hospital visit ranged from 199 days to 213 days across LOS groups without statistically significant pairwise differences, suggesting the LOS-readmission pattern observed here may be more specific to borderline personality disorder than to personality pathology broadly.
- Because the dataset excluded private hospitals, clinicians and planners should interpret the public-sector utilization estimates cautiously; the article notes that 16% of Australians with a diagnosis of BPD reported only using private hospital services.
