A Three Years Follow-Up of a Group of «everyday Patients» in a Mental Health Centre

SUMMARYObjective — This research concerns those patients who most attend the community Mental Health Centre (CSM), hereby called «everyday patients». According to a previous research (Pileggi et al., 1992) a sample of patients mostly attending the Centre had been pointed out. Basing on the number of attendances, it emerged that some of those patients (57) had been on the average attending the Centre more than twice a week and, despite being only 10% of the total number of users, they had taken on a large share of the services offered by the Centre (30%). Therefore, those patients were the ones the Centre had been working for more intensely and continuously. Three years later, the object of this research is to check the assistance and clinical destiny of such patients and compare their patterns of attendances to those ones regarding the remainder of the CSM users. The hypothesis is that «everyday patients» are assisted by different and continuous treatments and that such a procedure prevents patients from dropping out and determines a strong reduction in relapses and less frequent attendances. Design — Longitudinal study on a 42 patient sample (19 males, 23 females) on therapy at CSM. Setting — Mental Health Centre, «Saragozza» District, Sanitary Unit of Bologna. Main outcome measures — The following elements have been examined: 1) social and demographic features; 2) duration of psychiatric history; 3) clinical diagnosis according to DSM-HI-R, set by patients personal psychiatrist; 4) global functioning level as examined by two psychiatrists or psychologists from the Centre, using DSM-III-R Global Functioning Scale (GFS); 5) actions carried out and patterns of using the CSM services over the past 12 months. Concordance measures among independent examiners (Cohen K) and non-parametric variability measures for comparison between groups (Chi-square and Kruskal-Wallis tests) have been used. Results and conclusion — Results partially confirm the original hypotheses. In particular, complicated services (psychological and pharmacological therapies and rehabilitation) are carried out for the most of «everyday patients» and much more intensely to them than to the remainder of the users. No drop-out has been found out, the global functioning level of the patients is good in most of cases and the number of necessary admissions to psychiatric wards has been reduced. However, the «attendance share» relevant to the sample of «everyday patients» is still high compared to the total number of the CSM users. Besides, discharge rate is nought.