Scott C. Leon

OBJECTIVE: Clinical presentations of children and adolescents admitted to eight psychiatric hospitals were examined to determine variation in symptoms and severity of illness. METHODS: A prospective design was implemented using the Childhood Severity of Psychiatric Illness (CSPI) scale, a reliable measure of psychiatric severity and factors thought to affect decision making about mental health services. The CSPI was completed by mobile crisis workers after interviews with 875 children and adolescents to assess whether hospitalization was appropriate. All the children were wards of the state in Cook County, Illinois, and all were subsequently hospitalized. RESULTS: A factor analysis of the CSPI revealed three distinct factors: caregiver problems, externalizing symptoms, and internalizing symptoms. Children were classified as having mild, moderate, or severe problems or symptoms in the areas covered by the three factors. Chi square analyses revealed that significant variation existed between hospitals in the proportions of children with problems or symptoms in the three factor areas and in the severity of their problems or symptoms. CONCLUSIONS: The major finding of variation among the eight hospitals on measures of severity of children's psychiatric illness and caregiver problems empirically supports the importance of adjusting for severity before implementing initiatives to manage performance and outcome across a system of hospitals.

Patient profiling predicts improvement across psychotherapy sessions on the basis of intake clinical characteristics. Patients completed questionnaires before their 1st session and at other points during treatment. After using hierarchical linear modeling to calculate expected courses of improvement, 1/2 of the sample was divided into 1 of 2 groups: those whose treatment responses across sessions matched or exceeded their expected courses (75% of the sample) and those whose responses failed to match expectations. A discriminant function analysis indicated that the groups could be differentiated on the basis of intake characteristics; that is, patients with higher discriminant scores were more likely than those with low discriminant scores to have responded to psychotherapy as predicted. Successful cross-validation of the predictor weights was performed with the other 1/2 of the sample.