The study referred to by the Deputy, Suicide in Psychiatric In-patients in Ireland, by Eleanor Corcoran and Dermot Walsh, was published in the Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine. It noted that major changes have occurred in the delivery of mental health care in Ireland over the last 30 years, with large isolated mental hospitals being replaced by small psychiatric units in general hospitals and a network of community-based services. These general hospital units with open doors have a much higher concentration of potentially suicidal patients than was the case with the large locked institutions of the past, where such patients were often dispersed throughout the hospital. While the study found that short stay psychiatric in-patients were at a particularly high risk of suicide, it also noted that three quarters of those suicides studied, while technically in-patients, were on leave or otherwise absent from the hospital at the time of death. The authors also found that the number of suicides occurring in in-patient settings as a proportion of suicides in the general population is no greater now than at the end of the 19th century. They commented that this finding gave credence to the assumption that the move to community care which psychiatric services have undergone in the last 40 years has not contributed, of itself, to the increase in overall suicide rates.