Enhancing continuity of care - Residency training in an integrated inpatient-partial hospital program

This paper describes a teaching/service model that integrates inpatient, partial hospital, and intensive outpatient treatment. In this model, individual multidisciplinary treatment teams retain responsibility for a patient's care for any or all of three levels of intensity of services accessed during an episode of illness. This teaching/service model allows residents to follow patients for an average of 2.5 weeks across an entire acute episode of care compared with the 7.3 days of the average inpatient stay at the inpatient facility. The opportunity to continue treatment in step-down settings over longer periods of time allows residents and medical students to develop a fuller understanding of their patients. The authors believe that this continuum-care service model more efficiently trains residents in multiple aspects of psychiatric practice and provides patients with better care than the traditional inpatient-care service model.