Premium
A preliminary evaluation of treatment outcomes at a veterans' hospital's inpatient psychiatry unit
Author(s) -
Buchanan John P.,
Dixon Danny R.,
Thyer Bruce A.
Publication year - 1997
Publication title -
journal of clinical psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.124
H-Index - 119
eISSN - 1097-4679
pISSN - 0021-9762
DOI - 10.1002/(sici)1097-4679(199712)53:8<853::aid-jclp10>3.0.co;2-j
Subject(s) - psychiatry , unit (ring theory) , inpatient care , psychology , psychiatric hospital , medicine , health care , mathematics education , economics , economic growth
This article describes a preliminary effort to evaluate inpatient psychiatric services at the Carl Vinson DVA Medical Center in Dublin, Georgia. The facility annually treats a large number of veterans for a variety of psychiatric disorders. To determine whether these veterans improved following care, a simple pretest‐posttest group design was employed, using the SCL‐90‐R, to assess psychiatric symptomatology before and after inpatient treatment. Both statistically significant and practically meaningful improvements in symptomatology were evident at discharge. While the research design does not permit causal inferences, low‐cost evaluations such as this one simply demonstrating that patients get better are important first steps in empirically determining the efficacy of inpatient psychiatric services, and represent one means of demonstrating accountable practice. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Clin Psychol 53: 853–858, 1997