Abstract
Severe mental illness entails multiple hospital admissions and a large use of public resources. The Reflecting Team (RT), together with other dialogue strategies, place in a single therapeutic space, the patient, his family and a team of professionals to find together a solution to a situation of stagnation. The aim of this study was to evaluate feasibility and cost-effectiveness of a RT intervention in psychiatric inpatients in a public hospital. Six RT were performed, and clinical variables were collected retrospectively for six months pre-RT and post-RT. Both number of hospital admissions and total time spent in the psychiatric acute unit show a significant decrease. All computed cost showed statistically significant reduction. The results suggest RT might be a good strategy to introduce a positive change in the treatment of those psychiatric cases in which the patient and family find themselves caught in a system that seems to offer stale and ineffective help to problems that have become chronic.
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We want to thank all the patients and their families, all the professionals who have participated in the different reflecting teams and the [blinded] for making this intervention possible.
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The authors assert that all procedures contributing to this work comply with the ethical standards of the relevant national and institutional committees on human experimentation and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2008. The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
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Balcells-Oliveró, M.M., Nuño, L., Freixa, N. et al. Shared Reflection to Maximize Resources and Minimize Costs: The Reflecting Team Applied to a Hospital Environment. Community Ment Health J 57, 746–752 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10597-020-00716-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10597-020-00716-2