A Retrospective Review of the Clinical Significance of the Outcome Questionnaire (OQ) Measure in Patients at a Psychiatric Adult Partial Hospital Program

Introduction Outcome Questionnaire (OQ) measure is becoming a more popular assessment tool for monitoring treatment progress in psychiatry at different settings including inpatient and outpatient settings. It can also be used in non-clinical populations. However, little is known about the evaluation of this tool in the Adult Partial Hospital Program (PHP). Methods We conducted a study among patients in an Adult PHP where we extracted data from the OQ analysis program recorded for patients from January 1, 2015 to July 31st, 2020. Results We studied a total of 742 patients among which 509 (68.4%) were males. The mean age was 38.58 +/- 14.86 years. Most of the patients had depressive disorder (56.9%). The mean numbers of days on admission were 17.37 +/- 25.29 days. There is a consistent decrease in the total score average OQ score from initial to final measure with the year 2019 being 31.99 followed by 2017 (30.05) then 2020 (29.56) then 2015/2016 (28.38) and 2018 (27.27) p < 0.001. Also, for treatment progress it was observed that in years 2015/2016, there was significant improvement in 71.67% of the patients; in 2017, there was significant improvement in 78.53% of the patients; in 2018, there was significant improvement in 77.71% of the patients; while in 2019, there was significant improvement in 76.05% of the patients, and in 2020, there was significant improvement in 70.18% of the patients. Conclusion The direct benefit of the OQ measure to patients is to provide objective measurements of assessing clinical improvement or deterioration in the treatment progress of their clinical condition. Our study has proved that this is a useful tool to assess such in the Adult PHP.