  We study the effect of a partially thermalized scenario for chiral symmetry
restoration at finite temperature and quark chemical potential, and in
particular for the position of the critical end point in an effective
description of the QCD phase diagram. We show that these effects produce the
critical end point to be displaced towards larger values of temperature and
lower values of the quark chemical potential as compared to the case when the
system can be regarded as completely thermalized. We conclude that these
effects may be important for relativistic heavy ion collisions where the number
of subsystems making the whole interaction volume can be linked to the finite
number of participants in the reaction.
