Do emergency department patients with psychiatric complaints return at higher rates than controls?
Patients presenting to this ED with psychiatric complaints were not admitted at a significantly higher rate than non-psychiatric patients. These psychiatric patients did, however, have a significantly higher return rate to the ED when compared to non-psychiatric patients.
The advantage of this approach is to recruit a large number of subjects at limited cost. The procedure here proposed is a mainly exploratory approach aimed at establishing new study hypotheses: disability, in fact, is acknowledged by INPS when its cause is not occupational according to the current literature.