TREAT Service Evaluation

Schizophrenia is a serious and chronic mental illness. Symptoms experienced by individuals affected by the disease include experiences such as hallucinations and delusions. Individuals also suffer from more subtle symptoms such as social withdrawal and emotional blunting, and impairments in planning and memory. Combined these have a drastic effect on most individuals’ functioning in everyday life. Antipsychotic drugs are a major part of the treatment for schizophrenia. For some individuals these can be very effective and control the majority of symptoms. However about one third of patients show an inadequate response to most medications. These individuals are said to have “treatment resistant schizophrenia”. Most antipsychotic drugs are about as effective as each other but one antipsychotic drug called clozapine has been found to be significantly more effective than others when used with individuals with TRS. Clozapine, however, is frequently underused. This is partly because its use requires frequent blood tests, in addition some find it to have side effects that are hard to deal with, also some doctors are not experienced with its use so may be reluctant to prescribe it. The Treatment REview and Assessment Team (TREAT) has been established to address these shortcomings in the treatment of TRS. This is a specialized outpatient service that sees patients who live in Lambeth and Southwark. The service offers specialized TRS assessment and management, including starting patients on clozapine. The aim of the current project is to use the Clinical Record Interactive Search (CRIS) system to study whether the TREAT service reduces the time taken for individuals to commence clozapine treatment. It also aims to see whether patients that start clozapine with the TREAT service have less days as an inpatient that those that start it without the assistance of the service.