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 cause 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 up the whole interaction volume can be linked to the finite number of participants in the reaction.