Qualitative process evaluation of a psycho-educational intervention targeted at people diagnosed with schizophrenia...

Schizophrenia is a serious form of mental illness that often requires long term care. Empirical findings indicate that combining a psycho-educational intervention (PEI) with neuroleptic medication to treat schizophrenia is effective. However, there is little information on the therapeutic mechanism of PEIs.

A qualitative process evaluation was conducted with a purposive sample of people diagnosed with schizophrenia (PDwS, n = 8) and their Primary Caregivers (PCs, n = 9) who had received PEI as a part of an exploratory randomized controlled trial. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to explore potential processes underpinning any observed effect. Thematic analysis was used to analyze and identify prominent patterns in the data. Interviews were conducted between April 2013 and August 2013.

Three themes emerged from the qualitative interviews, 'Awareness of schizophrenia', 'Positive impact on health and wellbeing', 'empowerment and enhanced confidence', which described the variety of experiences with the intervention, although most reported that the intervention was acceptable and valued.

This study identified that individual understanding varied between PDwS and PCs and led to differences in the ways that they used knowledge gained from the PEI in everyday situations. These data support the importance of improving understanding of schizophrenia by PDwS and their PCs to enable them to benefit more fully from medication.

Current Controlled Trials ISRCTN78084871 . Retrospectively registered 28 December 2015.