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The views of voluntary patients

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Julia Moss*
Affiliation:
South Warwickshire Combined Care Trust, Orchard House, 83 Radford Road, Leamington Spa, Warwickshire
Anne Doyle
Affiliation:
Queen Elizabeth Psychiatric Hospital, Edgbaston, Birmingham
Andrew Macdonald
Affiliation:
Wakefield and Pontefract Community Health Trust
Ajaya Upadhaya
Affiliation:
Department of Psychiatry, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, USA
*
Correspondence
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Sir: We read with interest Paul & Oyebode's paper regarding the competence of voluntary psychiatric patients (Psychiatric Bulletin, August 1999, 463–466). We too have data on a related, but distinct, area of research. One hundred consecutive informal patients were interviewed on the third day of admission and one week later. At the first assessment, 78% thought they needed to be in hospital and 74% thought they needed treatment. Only 43% recalled receiving an explanation of their admission and treatment plan. We assessed their knowledge of their rights to refuse admission and treatment. At the first assessment, 67% were aware of their right to refuse treatment with 52% anticipating coercion if they exercised this right. Seventy-three per cent were aware of their right to leave hospital an 42% anticipated coercion if they exercised this right.

Type
Correspondence
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 Royal College of Psychiatrists

References

Sugarman, P. & Long, A. (1992) Informing voluntary patients of their rights. Psychiatric Bulletin, 16, 1477.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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