View clinical trials related to Psychiatric Illness.
Filter by:Avoidable hospital readmissions are a pressing problem for our healthcare system. They lead to substantial human suffering and higher financial costs. Most discharged psychiatric inpatients in Alberta are offered follow-up appointments with Alberta Health Services (AHS) Addiction and Mental Health (AMH) community providers. Patients often wait 28-38 weeks for their first appointment, which leads many to miss their first appointments, and increases the likelihood of relapse. As a result, patients discharged into the community are readmitted to the Emergency Department (ED). To address this significant revolving door, the investigators will implement a low-cost, evidence-based system that delivers daily supportive texts to patients' mobile phones. The text messages developed by experts and service users, based on cognitive behavioral therapy principles. Our proposed program also includes peer support from previous mental health patients who have had similar challenges as participants, but are now in recovery. In this way, the investigators aim to reduce the psychological treatment and support gap for AMH patients who have been discharged from acute care and are scheduled to receive mental health and psychiatric treatment from A&MH services after a long wait. Our pilot test of these interventions provide evidence that psychiatric readmissions, and emergency department visits can be reduced by 10-25% if implemented at scale in Alberta, thus resulting in cost-savings for individuals and the province.
Prescription of analgesic, sedative, and anxiolytic medication for children and adolescents is increasing in Western countries. In recent decades, rates have also increased in Norway, despite a relatively restrictive prescription practice. Analgesics, sedatives, and anxiolytics are among the medications most commonly prescribed to young people by general practitioners and others. Overuse of such medication adversely impacts individual and societal health, social and economic measures. For example, the risk of chronification of pain, development of addiction, and dropout from school and the workforce is high. Epidemiological research has largely failed to integrate vulnerable, young service users' perspectives in planning, interpretation and dissemination of results. This has resulted in limited identification of potential causes for the increasing exposure to prescription and overuse of analgesics and other addictive drugs among of children and adolescents, and the long-term consequences this may have for morbidity and addiction in early adulthood. Knowledge of early risk factors and plausible causal mechanisms is crucial for the development of timely and effective interventions to prevent inappropriate prescriptions in clinical practice. This prospective, longitudinal cohort study examines the use of analgesic, sedative, and anxiolytic medication among about 25,000 children throughout adolescence and young adulthood (1995 to 2020), specifically addressing changes in prescription over time, and early risk factors for the prescription of addictive drugs in adolescence and young adulthood and the subsequent development of mental health disorders.