Adherence with NICE guidance on lifestyle advice for people with schizophrenia: a survey

Abstract

Background Substantial weight gain is common in people taking antipsychotics. NICE recommends these patients are offered physical health screening and intervention. The STEPWISE trial is currently evaluating a lifestyle education programme in addition to usual care. However, it is difficult to define what constitutes “usual care”.

Aims To define “usual care” for lifestyle management in people with schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder and first episode psychosis in STEPWISE study sites.

Method Ten NHS Mental Health Trusts participated in a bespoke survey based on NICE guidance.

Results Eight trusts reported offering lifestyle education programmes. Nine Trusts reported offering smoking cessation support. Reported recording of biomedical measures varied.

Conclusions No consistent lifestyle education programme is currently offered across UK NHS Mental Health Trusts. The survey benchmarks ‘usual care’ for the STEPWISE study on which changes can be measured.

Metadata

Authors/Creators:

Swaby, L.
Hind, D.
Gossage-Worrall, R.
Shiers, D.
Mitchell, J.
Holt, R.I.G.

© 2016 The Authors This is an open-access article published by the Royal College of Psychiatrists and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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