| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 社會工作學研究所 === 106 === In Taiwan, more psychiatric patients stay in day care units in medical hospitals than in community rehabilitation centers due to unequally allocated reimbursement by the National Health Insurance Scheme. From design, staying in day care units is expected to be transitional so that these patients could reintegrate with the mainstream society. However, it has been reported that patients in day care units tend to prolong their stay without moving from medical hospitals to community programs. Therefore, effective rehabilitation program is called for to empower these patients so that they would successfully re-integrate into the mainstream society. This study aims to develop a empowerment group work program and to evaluate its effectiveness.
A mixed method approach was used for data collecting in this study. Qualitatively, participant observation was used to record how participants would react to a given opportunity to make decisions and take actions on their own will in groups. And quantitatively, a quasi-experimental design was used to compare the outcomes performance of participants between the experimental group and the control group. Twenty-five patients from one hospital were recruited as the experimental group, and thirty-five from another hospital as control group. Four outcome measures were included as dependent variables which were empowerment perception, social functions, severity of psychiatric symptoms, and quality of life.
The results indicated that participants had better performance in mutual participation, self-determination, and problem solving during e group process. However, insufficient resources for activities and uneven distributions of power within group were also observed. Quantitative analysis found that participants in the experimental group had significantly improved on their activity participation, psychiatric symptoms, and quality of life than participants in the control group. In addition, participants’ psychiatric symptoms have no significant impact on their empowerment perception and social functions. And, participants’ empowerment perception, social functions, and quality of life had interactional effect.
In conclusion, this study indicates that empowering patients in day care unit could improve their psychiatric symptoms and quality of life. Policy and practice implications are included.
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