Methods
Participants
This cross-sectional study was conducted in a public
tertiary care general hospital, Hospital Universitário de
Santa Maria (HUSM), in Santa Maria, southern Brazil, in
which psychiatric services are provided in a psychiatric
emergency department (PED) and a psychiatric unit
(PU). HUSM is a reference hospital serving an area of
500,000 inhabitants in the central region of the state of
Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. The PED, the interface between