It also said if children needed inpatient care they should be cared for in a unit which has a full range of services backed up by high dependency and intensive care facilities.
The study, led by first author Peter Ducharme, MSW, a clinical social worker at Boston Children's, compared two groups of 9- to 17-year-old children admitted to the hospital's Psychiatry Inpatient Service who had high levels of anger.
There is increasing pressure from the government to reconfigure children's services so that senior paediatricians are located in more specialist inpatient units, with smaller hospital wards closing or being converted to daytime-only units staffed by specialist nurses and visiting consultants.