TP59 An evaluation of cognitive remediation and supported employment to improve outcome for people with schizophrenia

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

Despite improvements in treatment for people with schizophrenia, the functional outcomes have changed little over the past 100 years. The rate of employment rarely gets above 10% and people with severe mental illnesses, when working, work fewer hours and generally earn less than the national average hourly wage (Cook and Razzano, 2000; Huxley and Thornicroft, 2003; Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, 2004). There is now evidence that individual illness-related factors affect the chance of employment with cognitive difficulties, particularly memory problems accounting for a significant proportion of the variance (McGurk and Mueser, 2004). Supported employment programmes do improve outcomes but many who receive this service still fail to achieve their employment goals and recently cognitive difficulties have been implicated as one of the barriers within these rehabilitation programmes. This proposal is for a pilot study to investigate whether therapy to improve cognition (cognitive remediation therapy, CRT) added to supported employment services can increase the number of people who benefit from supported employment services. The proposal is a trial platform because the model for this complex intervention requires that CRT produces an increase in cognition to a specific threshold and then that this improvement in cognition allows the person to benefit further from supported employment. The study will establish the levels of CRT improvement in the group of people eligible for supported employment and also the threshold improvements in cognition that have an impact on supported employment.