The public health nurse in mental health follow-up care.

To discover if psychiatric patients who received follow-up care in the home by public health nurses could assume a functional role in the family. and in the community to a greater extent than similar patients who did not receive home care, a sample of all chronic undifferentiated and paranoid schizophrenics who had been released from a Georgia mental hospital within a one-year period and who were receiving follow-up care in the home by the public health nurse was selected from County A and matched according to diagnosis, time released from the hospital, age, sex, race, income, education, and marital status as closely as possible with a sample of patients from County B who were not receiving such follow-up care. Eight pairs of patients were interviewed and rated according to the Psychiatric Status Schedule; six pairs of patients were rated on a questionnaire by a significant member of the family as to the amount of burden they imposed on the family. The rate of patients readmitted to the hospital was also calculated for each sample group and compared. No statistically significant differences were found in the readmission rate, functioning level in the family and the community, or burden on the family