A Systematic Approach to Disposition Decisions

The authors report an attempt to apply a decision-theoretic approach to solving the problem of deciding whether or not to release a patient from a psychiatric hospital. Personnel from various disciplines in 12 Veterans Administration hospitals developed an "outcome inventory" that represented the major concerns hospital staff members had when they were considering whether a patient should be released or retained. The authors believe that use of the outcome inventory approach will enable a decision maker to keep his thinking straight and preclude any one feature of the problem from achieving undue importance.