Characteristics of repeat users of an inpatient psychiatry service at a large military tertiary care hospital.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to identify clinical and demographic variables that correlated with readmission to a large tertiary care military psychiatric inpatient service located in the Washington, DC area.

Methods: Data from 983 consecutive inpatient admissions (comprised of 814 individual patients) over a 13-month period (July 1999-July 2000) were abstracted from medical records for retrospective analysis. Repeat users were defined as those individuals receiving two or more inpatient admissions to Walter Reed Army Medical Center during the study period.