The Effect of Social Group Work Intervention on Therapeutic Adherence of Patients with Severe Psychiatric Disorders, a Group Work Report

Introduction: Medication adherence has an essential role in good clinical outcome in the treatment of chronic psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depressive disorder and prevents psychiatric readmission. Medication non-adherence is prevalent among more than fifty percent of patients with chronic psychotic disorders. If a patient stops taking the medicine, the risk of relapse will increase three or five times. The purpose of this article is to report a group work intervention of social work based on Liberman model with the psycho-educational approach to increase the adherence treatment in a psychiatric hospital in Tehran.. Case Description: To organize a group in a psychiatric hospital, a social work student followed these stages: needs assessment, writing a proposal for organizing a group, conducting interviews with potential members, doing a pretest, conducting group work sessions and doing a posttest to evaluate the intervention. During the needs assessment, the most eight common problems among patients in the ward were identified and patients’ non-inherence to treatment was selected as the first priority for the group work. Three sessions were conducted based on the community re-entry program. Due to the characteristics of patients in the ward, the psycho-educational approach was applied. Group intervention was evaluated using a pretest and posttest designed for the community re-entry program that was conducted in individual sessions and after the last session, respectively. Conclusions: According to the results from the pretest and posttest, this group intervention has been effective in learning the importance of treatment adherence in patients.