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Youth Top Problems in an Acute Psychiatric Sample: Describing Consumer-Nominated Treatment Needs in an Adolescent Partial Hospital Setting

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Abstract

Given the wide range of diagnostic presentations treated in partial hospital programs, finding efficient ways to identify and measure progress on the chief concerns of consumers in these settings is important. The current study uses a self-administered version of the Top Problems Assessment to describe treatment targets identified by youth and their caregivers presenting for care at an adolescent partial hospital setting. Caregiver-youth agreement on these chief concerns upon admission and predictors of agreement were explored. About one-third (34.65%) of caregiver-youth pairs did not match on any target problems. Although anxiety and depression were the most commonly cited top problems in this sample, caregivers and youth exhibited disagreement on these domains. Treatment teams in acute care settings such as a partial hospital program can benefit from careful assessment surrounding the initial goals of treatment as youth and their caregivers may not agree on the referral problems upon entering a program.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the Youth Anxiety Center team for their support and contribution. We would like to thank all the partial program staff for their support as well as the families that have agreed to participate in this work.

Funding

This work was supported in part by the Youth Anxiety Center.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Weill Cornell Medicine—New York-Presbyterian Hospital, 315 East 62nd Street, 5th floor, New York, NY, 10065, USA

    Angela W. Chiu, Corinne Catarozoli & Shannon M. Bennett

  2. Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Columbia University Medical Center, New York, NY, USA

    Payal Desai

  3. The Center for Stress, Anxiety, and Mood, Summit, NJ, USA

    Laura Skriner

  4. Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, NYU Grossman School of Medicine/NYC Health + Hospitals/Bellevue, New York, NY, USA

    Paul Sullivan

Authors
  1. Angela W. Chiu
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  2. Payal Desai
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  4. Corinne Catarozoli
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  6. Shannon M. Bennett
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Angela W. Chiu.

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Conflict of interest

Shannon Bennett, Ph.D. has received research support, speaking fees and travel support for speaking engagements from the Tourette Association of America. She has received royalties from Oxford University Press, and receives royalties from Wolters Kluwer for articles on Child Anxiety for UpToDate. She has received research support from NIMH and PCORI. The other authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical Approval

The authors have no financial or proprietary interests in any material discussed in this article. All procedures involved in the study were in concordance with the ethical standards of the institutional committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments of comparable ethical standards. Institutional Review Board approval record number: 1501015832. Informed consent was obtained from all participants in the study.

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Chiu, A.W., Desai, P., Skriner, L. et al. Youth Top Problems in an Acute Psychiatric Sample: Describing Consumer-Nominated Treatment Needs in an Adolescent Partial Hospital Setting. Child Psychiatry Hum Dev 55, 520–530 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10578-022-01427-3

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