Congruency of diabetes care with the Chronic Care Model in different Swiss health care organisations from the patients' perspective: a cross sectional study.

QUESTIONS UNDER STUDY: Patients with chronic illnesses like diabetes mellitus benefit from care following the concept of the Chronic Care Model. To improve quality and to be responsive to patients' needs reliable data on patients' view of care in different healthcare settings are required. We evaluated the congruency of diabetes care with the Chronic Care Model between managed and non-managed care organisations from a patient's perspective. METHODS: We compared type 2 diabetes patients from non-managed care with a managed care organisation in Switzerland. We evaluated differences between these settings with the Patient Assessment of Chronic Illness Care 5A questionnaire (PACIC 5A; scale from 1-5) that combines the PACIC and the 5A-approach of physicians' counselling. RESULTS: 374 patients completed the PACIC 5A (326 from non-managed care settings, 48 from managed care). The adjusted average PACIC summary score was 3.18 in the non-managed care compared to 3.49 in the managed care sample (p = 0.046). Managed care patients scored significantly higher in the subscales goal setting (2.86 vs 3.29; p = 0.015), advice (3.23 vs 3.64; p = 0.014), assist (2.98 vs 3.44; p = 0.016) and arrange (2.50 vs 2.88; p = 0.049). CONCLUSIONS: Our data from different health care settings suggest that managed care is recognised by type 2 diabetes patients as care that is more congruent with the Chronic Care Model and offers more intense behavioural counselling and self-management support compared with usual primary care in Switzerland. Future research should evaluate larger, more comparable patient groups.

Neuropsychiatric consequences (atypical psychosis and complex-partial seizures) of ecstasy use: possible evidence for toxicity-vulnerability predictors and implications for preventative and clinical care.

Two case reports of ecstasy abuse and its serious neuropsychiatric complications are presented. The first patient developed a florid paranoid psychosis resembling schizophrenia after repeated long-term recreational ecstasy abuse, and significant alterations with intermittent paroxysmal discharges were found in his electroencephalogram. The second patient showed an atypical paranoid psychosis with Fregoli syndrome and a series of complex-partial epileptic seizures with secondary generalization after a first single ecstasy dose. Both subjects presented considerable vulnerability; the first a minimal brain dysfunction after perinatal asphyxia and a persisting attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, the second a long-lasting opioid addiction. In vulnerable individuals, dose-independent ecstasy abuse can lead to unpredictable and potentially dangerous neuropsychiatric sequelae which require proper initial assessment and adequate treatment.