Community-based Mental Health Care for People With Severe and Enduring Mental Ill Health (RECOVER-E) Croatia

Klinički Bolnički Centar Zagreb

Status: Unknown

Conditions: Schizophrenia; Bipolar Disorder; Severe Mental Disorder; Severe Depression

Treatments: Other: Community mental health team

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT03862209

KBC Zagreb RECOVER-E

Details and patient eligibility

About

To contribute to improving the level of functioning and quality of life and mental health outcomes for people with severe and enduring mental ill health (SMI) (schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression) by adapting and up scaling the implementation of a community-based service delivery model in Croatia.

Full description

For nearly 900 million people living in Europe, mental disorders constitute the most significant yet most neglected public health problem: depression affects an estimated 30.3 million Europeans, and psychotic disorders 5 million Europeans. People with severe and enduring mental ill health want the same things out of life as other citizens but are often placed in a vulnerable position and are hence afforded less opportunities to attain their goals and thus experience a lower quality of life, and have a lower life expectancy compared to the general population. For many countries that have undergone mental health services reform or have health systems in transition, efforts to make such comprehensive community-based mental health services available resulted in short-lived outcomes or are still to demonstrate substantial impact. RECOVER-E's aims to ensure well-functioning community mental health teams in 5 countries in Europe (Macedonia, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, and Montenegro), which will serve as the central node for coordination and provision of care for people with SMI. Our project narrows the implementation gap by going beyond infrastructure changes and pursuing the development of human resource capacity and care pathways that can be distilled in a comprehensive pathway to scale for regional and national decision-makers for uptake after the project's life span. RECOVER-E will: 1) Develop evidence based care pathways and treatment protocols for transition to scale for regional and national decision makers in 5 implementation sites; 2) Establish a peer to peer capacity building partnership in community mental health by linking a European expert panel with key stakeholders in 5 implementation sites to co-create community mental health services for people with SMI) 3) Evaluate intervention elements that will enhance sustainable adoption and implementation of community-based mental health care for people with SMI, by carrying out implementation research.

Enrollment: 200 estimated patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18 to 65 years old

Volunteers: No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

Adults (ages 18-65), current service users, with severe and enduring mental ill-health, which, for clinical purposes, typically relates to diagnostic categories of bipolar disorder, severe depression, or schizophrenia. We use the following definition for SMI:

• Presence of a psychiatric disorder that requires care and treatment (so, they are NOT in symptom remission)
• Has severe limitations in social and community functioning (i.e. they are not in functional remission)
• These problems are not transient (e.g. temporary, one-off) in nature (They are systematic and long-term)
• Coordinated care provided by care networks or teams is needed to implement the treatment plan

Exclusion criteria

Exclusion criteria at the patient level includes patients who do not consent to their data being collected who are part of the intervention or control conditions, those who are under the age of 18 at the start of the study.

Trial design

Primary purpose: Health Services Research

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

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200 participants in 2 patient groups

Community mental health team (CMHT)

Experimental group

Description:

CMHTs will be multidisciplinary; that is, staff will be appointed to the CMHTs that include nurses, social workers, psychiatrists, psychologists, and in this project, a peer expert (a person with lived experience of mental health services). All staff within the CMHT will have defined roles and responsibilities that align with the staff functions, roles and linkages detailed in evidence-based service delivery models for community mental health teams. Participant will randomly be assigned to CMHT that will provide outreach mental health care during the project.

Treatment:

Other: Community mental health team

Standard care

No Intervention group

Description:

Health care settings and their providers randomised to the control condition receive usual care: participant will gain standard care; ambulatory care, day hospitals or hospital admission.