Financial incentives to improve adherence to anti-psychotic medicatio

Not Applicable

Completed

• Conditions: Severe mental illness (psychosis); Mental and Behavioural Disorders; Unspecified nonorganic psychosis

• Registration Number: ISRCTN77769281
• Lead Sponsor: Barts and The London Queen Mary's School of Medicine and Dentistry (UK)

Brief Summary

Not available

Detailed Description

Not available

Study Timeline

• Study Start: 2009-04-06
• Last Update Posted: 17 October 2016

Recruitment & Eligibility

• Status: Completed
• Sex: All
• Target Recruitment: 136

Inclusion Criteria

The only inclusion criterion for teams is that they are a dedicated assertive outreach team (AOT) and operate a corresponding policy. The only exclusion criteria are lack of willingness to participate and an already existing practice of money for medication (MfM).

For patients in the AOTs there are the following inclusion criteria:
1. Being cared in the AOT for at least 4 months
2. Aged between 18 and 65 years of age, either sex
3. Capacity to give informed consent to participate in the study and actual written informed consent
4. An established diagnosis of schizophrenia, schizo-affective psychosis, or bipolar illness according to the International Classification of Diseases, 10th Edition (ICD-10)
5. Being prescribed depot injections of anti-psychotic medication
6. Poor adherence to anti-psychotic medication, i.e., missed 50% or more of prescribed depot injections, over the last 4 months (so that the percentage of taken depots is based on a minimum of 4 prescribed depots)
7. Failure of all other methods available to the team to ensure adherence to medication

Exclusion Criteria

1. Learning difficulty
2. Poor command of English so that clinical communication and discussion of agreements is impaired

Study & Design

• Study Type: Interventional
• Study Design: Not specified

Primary Outcome Measures

Name	Time	Method
Adherence to anti-psychotic maintenance medication during the 12-month trial period. Adherence will be measured, objectively, as the percentage of prescribed depot injections actually taken. As the primary outcome, the percentage will be used as a continuous variable. However, we will also analyse the percentage in a dichotomised way, comparing the ratio of patients with 'good' adherence (i.e., greater than or equal to 80% of prescribed depots taken) in the two conditions.