Community Case Management for Early Psychosis: is Two Year an Optimal Duration? A Randomized Controlled Study

Psychotic disorders involve disturbances in perceptual, cognitive and motivational processes central to the human life experience, which resulting in long-term and pervasive functional disability. In order to achieve the best possible long-term community outcome of psychotic disorders, early intervention service is set up, focusing on the first few years (the critical period) of the illness.

In Hong Kong, early intervention for psychotic disorder was provided since 2001. The integrated Early Assessment Service for Young people with psychosis (EASY) provide specialized care to early psychosis patients up to age 25. Evaluation of the EASY programme using a matched historical control suggesting that early intervention is a promising approach to promote community care for patients with psychosis.

In the current service, case management for patients will terminate after two years, and the patients will make transition to general psychiatric care afterwards. It is not clear whether the provision of additional case management in the community (e.g., for another year) will significantly enhance outcome further.

The proposed study aims to investigate the effectiveness of providing community based case management for an additional year for patients with psychotic disorders by using a randomized controlled design. The study recruit patients who had completed the first 2 years of case management in the EASY programme and randomized them to receive either an additional year of case management, or to terminate case management for the next 12 months. The hypothesis is that better outcome are found in patients who had 3-year case management compared with those who had only 2 years.