Use of Psychosocial Rehabilitation Process for Medication Management

1. Mutual Understanding (Diagnosis): Identifying symptoms and/or needs for help from a client’s and/or family’s perspectives.
2. Collaborative Mapping (Planning): Identifying a client’s and/or family’s strength or coping skills to manage symptoms that are interfering with their pursuit of life goals. The client or family can move faster for adjustment when their strength is acknowledged.
3. Negotiated Support (Intervention): Helping a client to clarify his or her concerns about medications and providing resources for decision making to choose pharmacological therapy. Convey the idea that the medication can work only when the client or family takes charge of it.
4. Interactive Appraisal (Evaluation): Appraisal of pharmacological therapy with client and family in terms of balancing benefits and adverse experiences.
5. Guided Exploration (Assessment): Identifying factors for possible nonadherence. Identifying possibility of better balance between benefits and adverse experiences with new knowledge on available medications. The value of the medications for the client needs to be recreated at all times because it can become unclear during the life-long treatment course.

Source: Adapted from Groenwold, L. (1996). Decreasing Readmission: The Comprehensive Role of Nursing in Psychsocial Rehabilitation. Presented at Contemporary Forums Psychiatric Nursing Conference in Hollywood, CA.