In Connecticut we have a wonderful Medicaid/T19/Behavioral Health program that allows home health nurses to monitor and/or administer medications for noncompliant mental health patients and home health aides to be in the home up to 14 hours a week to assist with medication reminders, ADLs, and IADLs.

I would be interested to know what impact our behavioral health nurses might have on an early-stage schizophrenia population versus our chronic noncompliant population. If we had our nurses in the home sooner, could we correct potentially problematic behavior before it became chronic?

View all comments by Wendy Camp

This paper is important because of its power and because this most basic question has never been satisfactorily answered. My concern is the very high dropout rate in both groups. Dropout across CBT of schizophrenia trials normally averages about 15 percent. CBT also usually attempts to work from a mini-formulation or macro-formulation which extends beyond the A-B-C. The CBT given here, however, does parallel the pragmatic technique-orientated CBT given in the Insight trial (Turkington et al., 2002). The problem here would appear to be the delivery of all four interventions in group format on the same day once per month. This is a massive burden on patients with cognitive deficits, negative symptoms, and treatment-resistant hallucinations and delusions. We must therefore be guarded about the conclusions. There is a signal, however, of the need for a psychosocial component in the management of every patient with schizophrenia. We are grateful to the authors for this publication.

References:

Turkington D, Kingdon D and Turner T. (2002) Effectiveness of a brief cognitive-behavioural therapy intervention in the treatment of schizophrenia. British Journal of Psychiatry 180, 523-527. Abstract

View all comments by Douglas Turkington