The Relationship Between Symptomatic Changes and Perceived Improvement Among Patients Treated in Brazilian Community Mental Health Services

Perceived improvement has been proposed as an important patient-reported outcome measure in mental health services evaluation. One advantage of this measure is that it can indicate whether other outcome measures, as pre-post differences in symptoms, correspond to a noticeable impact in patients’ liv...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Psychiatric quarterly 2012-09, Vol.83 (3), p.361-370
Main Authors: Andrade, Mário César Rezende, Bandeira, Marina, Perreault, Michel, Angélico, Antonio Paulo, de Oliveira, Marcos Santos
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Adult
Aged
Analysis of Variance
Attitude to Health
Brazil
Brazilian people
Clinical outcomes
Community mental health services
Community Mental Health Services - standards
Female
Health services
Health Services Research
Health Status
Humans
Literature reviews
Male
Medicine
Medicine & Public Health
Mental health care
Mental health services
Middle Aged
Original Paper
Outcome Assessment (Health Care) - statistics & numerical data
Outpatient treatment
Patients
Professionals
Psychiatry
Psychotherapy
Public Health
Severity
Severity of Illness Index
Sociology
Symptoms
Third party
Young Adult
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Summary:Perceived improvement has been proposed as an important patient-reported outcome measure in mental health services evaluation. One advantage of this measure is that it can indicate whether other outcome measures, as pre-post differences in symptoms, correspond to a noticeable impact in patients’ lives, as assessed by themselves. This study investigated the association between observer and self-reported symptomatic changes and perceived improvement by patients treated in two Brazilian outpatient mental health services. Significant and positive correlations were found between perceived improvement scores and both pre-post differences, obtained in observer-reported and patient-reported symptom scores. Nevertheless, scores of perceived improvement showed to be more correlated to patient-reported than to the observer-rated symptomatic change score. In addition, a greater correlation was found between perceived improvement scores and post-treatment symptom scores, compared to pre-treatment. These results suggest that an improvement in symptom severity, measured by pre-post differences scores, corresponds to the patient perception that he is actually better than before. However, the correlations found were moderate, suggesting that other factors may also be related to perceived improvement and must be investigated in further studies.
ISSN:0033-2720
1573-6709
DOI:10.1007/s11126-012-9206-6