Platt S D, Knights A C, Hirsch S R
Psychiatry Res. 1980 Oct;3(2):123-32. doi: 10.1016/0165-1781(80)90029-3.
A randomized trial to evaluate day hospital care as an alternative to inpatient treatment in the acute phase of psychiatric illness was abandoned when too few patients were admitted to the trial to enable any valid generalization to be made concerning the total at-risk population. In accounting for the failure of the experimental design, attention is drawn to the inability of the research team to influence either the organization of the unit, whereby junior staff had no contact with the day hospital, or the prevailing belief among senior staff that the two treatment settings serve distinctive, not alternative, functions. The implications of our failure for the feasibility of conducting a successful and externally valid controlled trial in this research setting are explored.
一项评估日间医院护理作为精神疾病急性期住院治疗替代方案的随机试验，因纳入试验的患者过少，无法对整个风险人群进行任何有效的归纳总结，故而被放弃。在分析实验设计失败的原因时，需要注意的是，研究团队既无法影响科室的组织安排（初级员工与日间医院没有接触），也无法改变高级员工中普遍存在的观念，即这两种治疗方式发挥着不同而非替代的功能。本文探讨了我们的失败对在该研究环境中开展成功且具有外部效度的对照试验的可行性所产生的影响。
