Prague, April 26 (CTK) – Schizophrenia patients spend an extremely long time in the hospital in the Czech Republic, compared to advanced countries, and their long hospitalisation is often unsubstantiated, psychiatrist Petr Winkler has told CTK, commenting on a study released by experts.
The hospitalisation of some patients lasts up to 20 years. Out of 22,281 schizophrenic patients hospitalised in 1998-2012, 3,601 spent more than one year in hospital and over 600 of them spent ten to 20 years there, according to a study released by the National Institute of Mental Health (NUDZ) and published by the prestigious U.S. journal Schizophrenia Research.
The study says that ITAREPS, a system developed by NUDZ experts, can prevent the deterioration of the condition in up to 70 percent of patients and thereby also their hospitalisation.
“Compared to advanced countries, the Czech data…are crushing. In Denmark, only 9.8 percent of schizophrenics were hospitalised in 2006, and they spent about 25 days in hospital on average,” Winkler, one of the authors of the study, said.
He said there exists no scientific data to prove any curative effect of a long stay in hospital. Long hospitalisation violates the patient’s human rights, unless it is justified as a measure to protect society or the patient.
“It results in stigmatising the patients, which makes them unwilling to seek psychiatric help, and also in other phenomena that are indirectly but strongly connected to the fatal attacks by patients, similar to those in Zdar nad Sazavou and Uhersky Brod,” Winkler said.
In Zdar nad Sazavou, south Moravia, a schizophrenic woman, who was previously released from the hospital and evaded out-patient treatment, entered a secondary school building and stabbed a 16-year-old student to death in 2014.
In Uhersky Brod, south Moravia, an elderly man whom his neighbours called mentally unstable, shot eight people dead in a pub last year.
At present, the average length of hospitalisation of psychiatric patients is 110 days for each stay in the hospital.
A planned psychiatry reform will transfer most of the care from hospitals to out-patient facilities and mental health centres.
Already, the ITAREPS system makes it possible to use telecommunication technologies and analysis to curb hospitalisations.
The system is also applied in Japan, for example.
“In cooperation with the Czech Technical University’s (CVUT) department of cybernetics, we have developed a mathematical algorithm that can predict a sharp deterioration of the patient’s condition two months ahead of time, which enables doctors to hospitalise them in time. It also gives us enough time to temporarily raise the dosage of medicines and prevent the deterioration,” said Filip Spaniel, from NUDZ.
Within the system, the patient, with the assistance of a family member, sends an SMS on their health condition to the central data base that automatically detects possible early warning symptoms and provides the information to the patient’s doctor.
