Skip to main content
  • Oral presentation
  • Open access
  • Published:

Evaluating patient outcomes in South Australia's new pediatric eating disorder treatment program

Eating disorder (ED) admissions to the Paediatric Inpatient Unit at Flinders Medical Centre increased sharply between 2008 and 2012. In response, the Paediatric Eating Disorder Program was established in February 2013. The multi-disciplinary program is based on the principles of the Maudsley approach, and consists of a 4-level system including medical stabilization, establishing normal eating and transition to home. To evaluate patient outcomes in the new program, a research project commenced in August 2013. In the six months to February 2014, 25 eligible patients were assessed. This patient group displayed severe ED psychopathology at a level consistent with clinical ED populations and significantly higher than matched non-clinical norms. Mean BMI at admission was 16.38 (SD = 2.05). After an average length of stay of 20.15 days (SD = 12.78), the mean discharge BMI was 18.19 (SD = 1.76). The number of readmissions has decreased since the program started: 39% of patients had more than one admission in 2013 compared to 47% in 2012. We present a sample case to highlight the complexities of this patient group, and to provide a practical description of the treatment approaches employed in the program.

This abstract was presented in the Service Initiatives: Child and Adolescent Refeeding and FBT stream of the 2014 ANZAED Conference.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Eva Vall.

Rights and permissions

Open Access  This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Yiu, M., Batterham, M. & Vall, E. Evaluating patient outcomes in South Australia's new pediatric eating disorder treatment program. J Eat Disord 2 (Suppl 1), O13 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1186/2050-2974-2-S1-O13

Download citation

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/2050-2974-2-S1-O13

Keywords