Knowledge and attitude towards home treatment among referring healthcare professionals and self-referring patients to a psychiatric hospital: Better information is needed

Sonja Mötteli, Ladina Risch, Florian Hotzy and Stefan Vetter

International Journal of Social Psychiatry, 2022, vol. 68, issue 4, 852-859

Abstract: Background: Home treatment (HT) is a patient-centred and cost-effective alternative to acute psychiatric inpatient care. However, the progress of its implementation and utilisation in routine care is slow. Aims: The aim of this study was to examine the knowledge and attitude towards HT among healthcare professionals. Method: This observational study included telephone-based semi-structured interviews of 140 referring healthcare professionals including 35 self-referring patients to a large psychiatric hospital in Switzerland during 6 months in 2020. We assessed their knowledge, attitude and experience with HT along with sociodemographic characteristics, professional background and the intention for the referral. We completed the interviews with routine medical data of the referred patients such as diagnoses or symptom severity. Results: Regarding referrals for inpatient treatment (involuntary and voluntary), half of the referring healthcare professionals and 80% of the self-referring patients had no prior experience or knowledge of HT. Knowledge of HT differed in the order of the participants’ working places. We found that most participants were uncertain about the inclusion/exclusion criteria for HT. Despite the low levels of knowledge, attitudes towards HT were overall positive. Conclusions: Our results indicate that a proportion of the patients referred for inpatient treatment might have been eligible for HT too. The referring healthcare professionals’ and patients’ unfamiliarity and uncertainty with HT seems to be an important reason that home-based treatment approaches are still underused, although they are viewed very positively. Besides providing more information to potential referring health professionals, psychiatric hospitals should always carry out a standardized evaluation if HT is an option in patients who are referred for inpatient treatment.

Keywords: Home treatment; acute psychiatric care; crisis; outreach services; mental health services; knowledge; attitude (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00207640211010848 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:socpsy:v:68:y:2022:i:4:p:852-859

DOI: 10.1177/00207640211010848

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in International Journal of Social Psychiatry
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().