Limited Evidence for the Effectiveness of P.R.N. Medications Among Psychiatric Inpatients
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The use of medications on a p.r.n. basis on psychiatric inpatient wards is common and widespread but without clear evidence of effectiveness. While individual studies have explored the use of p.r.n. medications in patients receiving scheduled psychotropic medications, no systematic review of the effectiveness of this use of p.r.n. medications has been done. A MEDLINE search was performed of all articles published in English between 1966 and November 2008. Studies were included only if they involved psychiatric patients and if they quantitatively explored the effectiveness of p.r.n. medications. Ten retrospective studies were identified that met inclusion criteria. Among the studies involving adult inpatients, estimates of effectiveness, primarily in the management of agitation, were consistently moderately high, averaging approximately 75%. These studies mainly involved use of antipsychotics and benzodiazepines. Lower estimates of about 30% were obtained in studies involving non-adult inpatients who had few psychotic disorders and among whom there was only minimal use of p.r.n. benzodiazepines. The meaning of effectiveness was often unclear across these retrospective studies. It also appears that important outcome measures, such as duration of hospitalization, may not be affected. Administration of p.r.n. medication was also associated with a greater risk of adverse events. Future studies concerning use of p.r.n. medications in psychiatric patients should examine objective ratings of agitation, medication effects, and adverse events.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.027 | 0.177 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".