Department of Psychology, Universidade Federal de São João del-Rei (UFSJ), Campus Dom Bosco, Praça Dom Helvécio, 74, PPGPSI sala 1.53, São João del-Rei, MG, 36301-160, Brazil.
Psychiatr Q. 2012 Sep;83(3):361-70. doi: 10.1007/s11126-012-9206-6.
Perceived improvement has been proposed as an important patient-reported outcome measure in mental health services evaluation. One advantage of this measure is that it can indicate whether other outcome measures, as pre-post differences in symptoms, correspond to a noticeable impact in patients' lives, as assessed by themselves. This study investigated the association between observer and self-reported symptomatic changes and perceived improvement by patients treated in two Brazilian outpatient mental health services. Significant and positive correlations were found between perceived improvement scores and both pre-post differences, obtained in observer-reported and patient-reported symptom scores. Nevertheless, scores of perceived improvement showed to be more correlated to patient-reported than to the observer-rated symptomatic change score. In addition, a greater correlation was found between perceived improvement scores and post-treatment symptom scores, compared to pre-treatment. These results suggest that an improvement in symptom severity, measured by pre-post differences scores, corresponds to the patient perception that he is actually better than before. However, the correlations found were moderate, suggesting that other factors may also be related to perceived improvement and must be investigated in further studies.
患者感知改善被提议作为精神卫生服务评估中的一个重要患者报告结局指标。该指标的一个优势在于，它可以表明其他结局指标（如症状的前后差异）是否对应于患者自身评估的生活中显著的影响。本研究调查了在巴西两家门诊精神卫生服务机构接受治疗的患者中，观察者报告和患者自我报告的症状变化与患者感知改善之间的关系。在观察者报告和患者报告的症状评分中，感知改善评分与症状的前后差异均呈显著正相关。然而，与观察者评定的症状变化评分相比，感知改善评分与患者报告的症状变化评分更为相关。此外，与治疗前相比，感知改善评分与治疗后症状评分之间的相关性更大。这些结果表明，通过前后差异评分测量的症状严重程度的改善与患者认为自己实际状况比以前更好的感知相符。然而，所发现的相关性是中度的，这表明其他因素也可能与感知改善有关，需要在进一步的研究中进行调查。
