A full-text Chinese translation of this article will be available at www.saponline.org on July 25, 2014.

Retrospective assessment of factors associated with readmission in a large psychiatric hospital in Guangzhou, China •Original article• Background: Most psychiatric inpatients in China are involuntarily admitted by their families, resulting in relatively long admissions and relatively low readmission rates. However, this pattern may change after implementation of China’s new national mental health law (promulgated in 2013), which restricts involuntary psychiatric admissions to the small proportion of mentally ill individuals who are a danger to self or others. Aim: Assess the factors associated with readmission rates of psychiatric inpatients in Guangzhou, China. Methods: A retrospective analysis of data from the Guangzhou Psychiatric Hospital, one of the largest psychiatric hospitals in China, used Cox regression models to evaluate the relationship between age, gender, diagnosis, marital status, employment status, relationship with the primary caregiver, type of medical insurance, length of stay of the index admission, and the number of previous admissions to estimate the risk of readmission over the year following discharge. Multivariate regression is used to assess factors associated with the total time of readmission during the year of follow-up