What is it about?
This study examined whether involvement in psychiatric care prior to inpatient admission is related to post-hospital follow-up. We analyzed information from 18,793 adult patients discharged to the community following inpatient psychiatric care and grouped each admission into whether patients had full, partial, low, or no engagement in outpatient psychiatric services in the 6 months prior to admission. The likelihood of psychiatric inpatients following up with outpatient psychiatric care was directly related to their level of outpatient care engagement prior to hospital admission, but even among those who had not been engaged in outpatient care, inpatient discharge planning was associated with a greater likelihood of receiving follow-up outpatient care.