Abstract:

Aim
The aim is to study the first one year outcome of psychiatric adolescents treated with a multiprofessional intervention, in terms of competences, psychopathology and global psychosocial functioning.
The context is a Service for Adolescents, a daily center, which receives adolescents between 12 and 19 with psychopathological disorders of middle - severe seriousness. Multiprofessional team is formed by a child neuropsychiatrist, a psychologist and three educators. Patients undergo a multimodal treatment, characterized by integrated educational and clinical actions.

Sample
Among 100 adolescents who were referred to the Centre, 65 individuals had been clinically followed for 12 months. The sample is formed by 46 males (71%) and 19 females (29%) aged 12 to 19 years. 20 adolescents (31 %) attend primary school, 22 adolescents (34 %) secondary school, while 22 patients (35 %) interrupted their educational career.

Methodology
To verify the efficacy of treatments, it has run a retrospective study which has analysed those treated patients for whom one year follow up was available. The psychiatric disorders of the subjects were diagnosed according to ICD 10 (WHO 1994). The Global Assessment Functioning Scale (GAF) (APA 1994; Startup, Jackson, Bendix 2002) and Youth Self Report (YSR 11-18) (Ivanova, Dobrean, Dopfner, Erol, Fombonne, Fonseca, et al. 2007) were used to evaluate therapeutic efficacy of interventions 12 months after the beginning. With respect to GAF, patients were considered clinically improved, worsened or unvaried depending on the scoring reported during the retest (a difference in score of at least 10 points was required to define improvement or aggravation, otherwise the patient was considered unvaried). Clinical evolution was statistically studied in relation to other variables as psychiatric diagnosis, timing of intervention, therapeutic compliance, collaboration with parents.
Data about patients were collected in an anamnesis schedule, then transferred into a computerised database for computation, which is performed using SSPS version 10 and SAS® package, rel. 9.1.3.

Results
One year follow up shows that the multiprofessional treatment has been more efficacy on emotional disease and social problems, rather then on behavioural disorders. Among the results, it is to be mentioned an association between clinical outcome and other variables as timing of the intervention, collaboration with patients’ parents and patient’s therapeutic compliance are emerged: Better outcome is related to longer treatments, presence of collaboration between parents and clinician and a good patient’s therapeutic compliance.

References:
APA (1994). DSM IV. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental disorders, Axis V.
Ivanova, M.Y., Achenbach, T.M., Rescorla, L.A., Dumenci, L., Almqvist, F., Bilenberg, N., Bird, H., et al. (2007). The generalizability of the Youth Self-Report syndrome structure in 23 societies. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 75, 5, 729-38.
Startup, M., Jackson, M.C., Bendix, S. (2002). The concurrent validity of the Global Assessment of Functioning (GAF). British Journal of Clinical Psychology 41, 4, 417-422(6).
WHO (1994). ICD 10. International Classification of Diseases.