A team from the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto (FMUP) and the Hospital Center of Tâmega e Sousa (CHTS) won the first Janssen Neuroscience RWE 2022 Award, in the category “Clinical Series”. The award distinguished the work “Hospitalizations Readmission Rates in Patients with Schizophrenia: a Nationwide Analysis”, whose first author is Manuel Gonçalves Pinho, a physician and researcher at FMUP/CINTESIS.

The study analyzed more than 25,000 episodes of hospitalization due to schizophrenia from more than 14,000 patients over eight years in Portuguese public hospitals. The objective was to know the readmission rate of patients in these hospitals.

In all, 3,378 patients, or 23.7%, were readmitted during a one-year period. All told, this represents about a quarter of all patients. Within 90 days of discharge, 14.1% of patients had to return to the hospital. Within a month, 8.6% were readmitted. More than 2% were hospitalized again within five days of discharge.

Readmissions to Portuguese hospitals were more frequent among males, and the shortest periods of stay of new admissions were also more frequent in males.

The conclusions of the study point to the fact that new hospitalizations are a possible indicator of treatment failure and represent a decrease in the quality of life of patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, a severe mental illness that can be characterized by episodes of decompensation with eventual need for hospital treatment.

However, “mental health care in the community should represent one of the pillars of treatment for these patients, and investment and development of partnerships between the community and health services are needed to reduce the need for hospitalizations and promote social reintegration of patients with schizophrenia,” says Manuel Gonçalves Pinho.

This work is part of a broader research line in the area of mental health and the use of secondary data, developed by a team from FMUP, which had already analyzed and published unprecedented data on schizophrenia hospitalizations in Portugal.

In addition to Manuel Gonçalves Pinho, João Pedro Ribeiro (CHTS), Lia Fernandes and Alberto Freitas (both from FMUP/CINTESIS@RISE) have authored this study.

The RWE 2022 Awards were given during the VII Janssen Neuroscience Forum that took place in Lisbon, last May.