The Effectiveness of Return to Community Program on Increasing Interpersonal Skills and Life Quality of Patients with Schizophrenia

Abstract

This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of return to the community programs on increasing interpersonal skills and the life quality of patients with schizophrenia. The research design is applied in terms of purpose and is semi-experimental with two groups of control and experiment in terms of the implementation method. For this purpose, among the patients with schizophrenia in Sanandaj, 24 patients were selected by the available sampling method and divided into two groups of 12 patients. At first, both groups responded to questionnaires of increased interpersonal skills and life quality. Then, for the first group of the experiment, 16 sessions of return to the community-based educational programs were conducted in a group, but no intervention was performed for the control group. After the intervention, the data obtained from questionnaires of interpersonal skills and life quality from patients of two groups were used in the pre-test and post-test phases using MANCOVA statistical method for measuring the significance level and then analyzed. The results showed that return to community programs had a significant effect on increasing interpersonal skills and life quality in patients with schizophrenia (0.05).