A study to explore patients' perception of their quality of life over time while being supported by psychiatric outreach team.

Abstract

Quality of Life (QoL) has been identified as one of the important indicators for care outcomes in community psychiatric care. The effect of health care services, such as Outreach Teams is nowadays commonly being assessed by rating improvement in the QoL of those who receive this type of care. Furthermore, academics such as Barker identified the importance of helping patients to actively participate in discussing and designing a tailored care plan so as to address their needs. The Tidal Model, which was formulated on this concept, has been used as the philosophical background of this research study. This study was aimed at exploring the perceptions of psychiatric patients living in the community, who are being supported by a Psychiatric Outreach Team. An additional objective was that of exploring any changes that might occur in the QoL over time. A mixed-method design, which is mainly descriptive and exploratory qualitative in nature, was used to explore the perceptions of the sample under study, as regards areas related to their QoL. Data was collected by means of an interview format which was structured on questions from an established questionnaire, namely the 'Carers' and Users' Expectations of Services' (CUES-U) questionnaire. Twenty individuals from the list of the patients being supported by the Outreach Team were randomly chosen and asked to participate in the study. Each of the subjects was interviewed twice with a period oftwo months between each interview. Descriptive statistics were used to analyse the quantitative data obtained while the qualitative data was analysed by means of content analysis.

Overall, the participants perceived their QoL to be satisfactory. However, there are issues, such as social life, family and friends and fear that were of particular concern to the respondents. Perceptions were found to change minimally, with borderline or significant positive differences on the areas of Family and friends, Money and How the day is spent. One cannot exclude that these changes were brought in effect by Outreach support, although other factors might have been involved. Finally, the trends in the findings were consistent with other research in this field of study and could be associated with the philosophy of the Tidal Model. Despite a wealth of research about QoL and individual constituents of this concept, limitations in current knowledge as regards patient perceptions were identified and suggestions for future research were provided. Other recommendations regarding both research and clinical practice were included in an attempt to address the current situation and ways of improving it.