People, who have severe mental illness, will have a cycle of hospitalization, skipped medication, and re hospitalization. As a result they have psychiatric disorders, refuse treatment and threatening to themselves or others.
Now, a study has found that these patients can be regulated if they are not hospitalized and proven this had positive results. By using this outpatient treatment is progressed well, Cost and Medical aid for caring these patients is dropped by half or more.
This study was run by New York State, known as Kendra’s Law because it was started after Kendra Webdale was pushed to her death on the New York City subway tracks with untreated schizophrenia in 1999. Other states also follow this, but New York’s is most developed and have resources into paying for it.
Researchers at Duke University suggest the program can be helpful for patients who constitute a small number of the people with mental illness
Dr. Paul S. Appelbaum, director of the Division of Law, Ethics and Psychiatry at Columbia University’s medical school, has not been involved in any of the research asks whether this law is working. He said, “These programs will help a group of patients often called as revolving-door patients.”
North Carolina’s program is also developed; the program says that New York’s experience will persuade other states to invest.
Some call these programs as outpatient commitment or assisted outpatient treatment, who have not been involuntarily committed to hospitals. Others worry that intensively monitoring patients in the community could increase costs or shift services away from other people with mental illness
The Duke study examined costs for 634 people in the year before the court orders, the year after and two years after. Jeffrey Swanson, a psychiatry professor at Duke and lead author of the study, said the results suggested that “if you pour some money into assisted outpatient treatment, if you target it correctly, there are some significant savings.”
A co-author, Dr. Marvin Swartz, head of Duke’s social and community psychiatry division, said a study in 2010 by the team found that patients “were less likely to return to the hospital, if they went to the hospital they had shorter lengths of stay, they were more likely to be adherent to medication, and generally they functioned better in the community.”