Extended Early Intervention Versus Standard Psychiatric Care for Adults with First-Episode Psychosis WC Chang *, SKW Chan, EHM Lee, CLM Hui, EYH Chen
COMMISSIONED RESEARCH ON MENTAL HEALTH POLICY AND SERVICES Extended early intervention versus standard psychiatric care for adults with first-episode psychosis WC Chang *, SKW Chan, EHM Lee, CLM Hui, EYH Chen KEY MESSAGES Further investigation involving greater number of patients is required. 1. Adult patients with first-episode psychosis who received 3-year extended Early Assessment Service for Young People with Psychosis (EASY) had significantly shorter treatment delay than Hong Kong Med J 2019;25(Suppl 3):S4-8 those treated with standard psychiatric care. SMH project number: SMH-47 2. Extended EASY programme was superior to 1,2 WC Chang, 1,2 SKW Chan, 1 EHM Lee, 1 CLM Hui, 1,2 EYH Chen standard care in improving functional outcome and alleviating symptom severity, in particular 1 Department of Psychiatry, LKS Faculty of Medicine, The University of negative and depressive symptoms. Hong Kong 2 State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, The University of 3. Lack of positive effect of extended EASY Hong Kong programme on reducing admission and suicide rates may be due to the modest sample size. * Principal applicant and corresponding author: changwc@hku.hk Introduction study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of extended EASY programme for adult patients with FEP. Psychotic disorders including schizophrenia affect 3% of the population and have high disease burden. Numerous early intervention (EI) programmes Methods for psychosis have been established worldwide This was a multicentre study involving seven clusters in the past two decades, based on the premise including Hong Kong West, Hong Kong East, that shortening of treatment delay and provision Kowloon East, Kowloon Central, Kowloon West, of phase-specific treatments in the initial years New Territories East and New Territories West.
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