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CQC Reports / Document

Psychiatric Emergency Room Overcrowding: A Case Study

Date:

May 1989

Category:

Description

This report concludes that the staggering demands placed on New York City's chronically overcrowded and understaffed hospital psychiatric emergency rooms (PERs) and "gridlocked" inpatient units may have been major factors affecting emergency evaluations, and admission and discharge decisions on a patient who later allegedly killed his parents.