Campus Location

Dallas Campus (Online)

Date of Award

10-2020

ORCID

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1434-9305

Document Type

DNP Project

Department

Nursing

Degree Name

Doctor of Nursing Practice

Committee Chair or Primary Advisor

Faisal Aboul-Enein

Second Committee Member or Secondary Advisor

Tonja Hartjes

Third Committee Member or Committee Reader

Christina Ryan

Abstract

In this project, the investigator used the Integrated Primary Care Consulting Psychiatry Toolkit (IPCCPT) to assist with an integrated primary care and psychiatric clinic’s operations through a virtual educational intervention to minimize care fragmentation for adults with schizophrenia. Mortality rates for adults with schizophrenia at this urban outpatient mental health clinic rose in patients with schizophrenia. From March to September 2020, there were 45 patient deaths not related to COVID-19. The investigator conducted a virtual educational webinar on the integration of primary care and psychiatry using the IPCCPT with 37 full-time employees in the clinic. The investigator measured the knowledge level of the clinic staff using a pretest and a posttest. Participants completed a questionnaire with the same questions before and after watching the webinar. The mean difference of both the pretest and the posttest was –.027, t(36) = 0.21, p = .838. The project findings demonstrated that the webinar had only a marginal impact on educating employees about using the IPCCPT because the staff were knowledgeable about integrating primary care and psychiatry before the intervention. However, there remained a gap in services because patients continued to die from chronic illness at an alarming rate. Individuals with mental illness die from chronic disease complications 8 to 32 years earlier than the general population. However, with proper health care maintenance, chronic diseases can be identified and treated early in schizophrenic patients by integrating primary care and psychiatry.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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