[Employment prospects of persons with severe mental illness after an integrated mental and psychomotor training in a vocational rehabilitation programme].

There is a lower employment rate among persons with severe mental illness.
AIM: In order to increase the employment rate among mentally ill patients, azertie, a centre for vocational rehabilitation, has integrated a combination of psychomotor and mental training (the I Care concept) into its vocational rehabilitation programme. We investigated the results of the azertie system via a pilot study
METHOD: Over a period of 10 week period of guided training for work, persons with severe mental illness receive three sessions per week of mental training and psychomotor training.
RESULTS: 149 clients participated in the study. Of these, 70 clients (47%) found employment within the year. 50 participants were still receiving training; of these, 10 (6.7%) were likely to find employment. At a follow-up after at least one year of employment 90% of the clients was still at work.
CONCLUSION: The results of this pilot study should be interpreted with some caution because we did not use a control group. Nevertheless, when we compare the total employment rate (53.7%) with the employment rate in the period before the start-up of the I Care programme (10%) we can conclude that our programme led to a five-fold increase in the percentage of persons in this vulnerable group.