The Clinical Anxiety Scale, the Generalized Contentment Scale, the Revised UCLA Loneliness Scale, and the Problem-Solving Inventory were administered to nine male veterans in a Domiciliary Care for Homeless Veterans program. All four rapid assessment instruments were administered when the veterans were admitted into the program, and again after 3 months of participation. The program had an intense focus on individual and group counseling. A t test for correlated means was conducted on the pretest-posttest scores of each instrument. All results were statistically significant, suggesting that this program is effective in helping reduce homeless veterans' feelings of anxiety, depression, and loneliness, and helping them gain confidence in their problem-solving abilities.
This article describes a preliminary effort to evaluate inpatient psychiatric services at the Carl Vinson DVA Medical Center in Dublin, Georgia. The facility annually treats a large number of veterans for a variety of psychiatric disorders. To determine whether these veterans improved following care, a simple pretest-posttest group design was employed, using the SCL-90-R, to assess psychiatric symptomatology before and after inpatient treatment. Both statistically significant and practically meaningful improvements in symptomatology were evident at discharge. While the research design does not permit causal inferences, low-cost evaluations such as this one simply demonstrating that patients get better are important first steps in empirically determining the efficacy of inpatient psychiatric services, and represent one means of demonstrating accountable practice.
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