Citation

Atkinson JA, Page A, Skinner A, Heffernan M, Prodan A, Hickie IB. Front. Psychiatry 2019; 10: e448.

Affiliation

Brain and Mind Centre, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, Frontiers Media)

DOI

10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00448

PMID

31333513

PMCID

PMC6615492

Abstract

There has been ongoing debate regarding the impact of reductions in psychiatric beds on suicide rates, and the potential effect of reallocation of acute hospital funding to community-based mental health programs and services. Computer simulation offers significant value in advancing such debate by providing a robust platform for exploring strategic resource allocation scenarios before they are implemented in the real world. We report an application that demonstrates a threshold effect of cuts to psychiatric beds on suicide rates and the role of context specific variations in population, behavioral, and service use dynamics in determining where that threshold lies.

FINDINGS have important implications for regional decision-making regarding resource allocation for suicide prevention.

Language: en

Keywords

psychiatric beds; public mental health; suicide prevention; systems modeling and simulation; threshold effects