Wasmer, D., Pinkerton, M., Dincin, J., & Rychlik, K. (1999, October/November/December). Impact of flexible duration assertive community treatment: Program utilization patterns and state hospital use. J. Rehab., 25-29.
This paper reports on a 10-year study of mental health patients in assertive community treatment programs (ACT), and their moving in and out of the programs when hospitalization was necessary.
The subjects of the study were 66 patients in an ACT program who were followed for 10 years and segregated according to their ACT utilization into three groups: those who received uninterrupted ACT services; those who had multiple service episodes; and those who had only a single service episode. This third group of people were transferred and did not return to ACT before the end of the study.
The setting for the study was an area of Chicago known as "Back of the Yards." It is an old neighborhood with a population which is 58 percent Caucasian, 30 percent Hispanic, and 12 percent African American, in the middle to lower-middle class socioeconomic strata.
The behavior studied was the use of ACT and hospitalizations.
The study was performed by examining hospital records for the year prior to ACT intake and for each of the following ten years. Admissions and bed-days for the year prior to ACT and for years two, four, six, 8 and 10 after ACT intake were examined. At the end of the study, telephone interviews were conducted to confirm the status of people not active in the program. Member vignettes were created to illustrate the effects of ACT on the three groups studied.
Results of the study showed that *0 percent of the original subjects served by the ACT program were moved to mainstream services with no significant negative effect on hospitalization rates. About two-thirds of the hospitalized patients returned
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