Acute psychiatric admissions from an out-of-hours Casualty Clinic; how do referring doctors and admitting specialists agree?

Background Over the last decades there has been an increasing pressure on the acute psychiatric wards in Norway. The major contributor to psychiatric acute admissions at the University Hospital of North Norway in the city of Tromso in 2001 was the GP-based Tromso Casualty Clinic, only open out-of-hours. We explored all acute psychiatric referrals from Tromso Casualty Clinic in 2001. The purpose of the study was to characterize the admissions and assess the agreement between the referring doctors and the hospital specialists according to the need for hospitalization, agreement on application of the law and the diagnostic evaluation to assess whether the admissions were appropriate.