Community Aftercare of Patients Discharged From Utah State Hospital: A Follow-up Study

To find out whether patients discharged from mental hospitals to the community are following recommended courses of aftercare treatment, the authors, with the assistance of five medical students, studied a sample of patients discharged from Utah State Hospital during 1973 and 1974. The discharge plans of 143 patients admitted from Salt Lake County indicated that 125 of them should have received aftercare services from a community mental health center. A review of CMHC records and Interviews with the patients indicated that only 100 actually had contact with a center. Only 43 of the patients were still receiving aftercare services in the summer of 1975.