Treatment Delays for Involuntary Psychiatric Patients Associated with Reviews of Treatment Capacity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To determine the duration of delays in treatment initiation when involuntary patients apply for a review of a finding of treatment incapacity and to estimate the cost of keeping patients hospitalized without treatment in these circumstances. METHOD: Using a computerized database and written records, we identified all patients at 2 psychiatric hospitals in Ontario who applied for a review of a finding of treatment incapacity during a 10-year period. We recorded clinical and demographic variables, dates of stopping and starting medication, and dates of review board hearings and outcomes. We also noted all cases in which a patient appealed a decision from the review board to the court. RESULTS: Two hundred and thirty-seven patients made 334 applications to the review board. The board overturned the physician's finding of incapacity in only 5 (1.5%) applications; 15 appealed the review board's finding to the courts. None of these appeals were successful. In the absence of an appeal to the courts, the average delay in initiating treatment was 25 days. For patients appealing to the court, the average delay was 253 days. The cost of hospitalizing untreated patients while their capacity was under legal review was estimated at $3,867,000, of which $1,333,000 could have been saved if treatment had started immediately after the review board confirmed incapacity. CONCLUSION: We have identified extensive delays in initiating psychiatric treatment for a number of patients. These delays are associated with legal review of treatment capacity. There are serious clinical risks and substantial costs associated with delay in treating patients with acute psychiatric illness. Where jurisdictions review treatment capacity, we recommend that treatment not be impeded once a review board has confirmed a clinical finding of incapacity.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.026 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
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".