Intrahospital relocation of psychiatric patients and effects on aggression

✍ Scribed by Mary Durand Thomas; Ethel Stitt Ekland; Myra Griffin; Ruth Jalane Hagerott; Suzanne Sexton Leichman; Helen Murphy; Oliver Hilton Osborne

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1990
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 776 KB
• Volume: 4
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1532-8228
• DOI: 10.1016/0883-9417(90)90003-4

✦ Synopsis

Aggression is a recurring problem with psychiatric patients and can pose special problems on inpatient units. The purpose of this study were to identify changes in patients aggression as a consequence of routine individual relocation and to identify the relationship of certain variables with patterns of aggression. Using an adaptation of the Overt Aggression Scale (Yudofsky, Silver, Jackson, Endicott, & Williams, 1986), data were collected from the patient records of 201 individuals who had been admitted to a state hospital and subsequently transferred to another ward in the same hospital. There was a phase by day interaction with the day-to-day pattern of aggression in the pretransfer phase differing significantly from that in the posttransfer phase. The highest mean aggression for a single day was the day following transfer; the second highest was the day before transfer. There were main effects for age and number of hospital admissions.