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.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 448 |
| Number of pages | 3 |
| Journal | Frontiers in Psychiatry |
| Volume | 10 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2019 |
Open Access - Access Right Statement
© 2019 Atkinson, Page, Skinner, Heffernan, Prodan and Hickie. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.Keywords
- mental health services
- prevention
- suicide
