Australia's Doctor's Guidelines for Treatment of Schizophrenia - Latest Version

SzAdmin · May 18, 2017, 3:33pm

For those who are interested in how other countries recommend treatment of schizophrenia (where it is much more advanced than in the USA) - here is the latest guidelines for treatment of early psychosis (when it first starts) and also ongoing treatment of Schizophrenia. For best treatment I recommend you review it and see if there are areas where new treatments are recommended that you are not getting - and discuss it with your doctor (take a printout of the document to your doctor).

Here is the web page where you can download the documents:

Australia and New Zealand Schizophrenia Treatment Guidelines for Doctors (2016):
https://www.ranzcp.org/Publications/Guidelines-and-resources-for-practice/Schizophrenia-early-psychosis-resources.aspx

Here are the treatment guidelines for all psychiatric disorders (anxiety, ocd, etc.) that people might also be interested in:

https://www.ranzcp.org/Publications/Guidelines-and-resources-for-practice.aspx

AND for those who are interested - here also are the UK’s treatment guidelines for schizophrenia:

UK Psychosis and schizophrenia in adults: prevention and management (2014)
https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/cg178

Here is Canada’s Psychiatric Society Schizophrenia Treatment Guidelines from 2005:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0ahUKEwi4wd-c5PnTAhUF8GMKHUbfCE4QFghUMAA&url=https%3A%2F%2Fww1.cpa-apc.org%2FPublications%2FClinical_Guidelines%2Fschizophrenia%2Fnovember2005%2Fcjp-cpg-suppl1-05_full_spread.pdf&usg=AFQjCNESQLN6HufLP64M7MJpuUIubYL-Ig&sig2=Up9iYcIdDpLAu_JQ46Lh_A

Unfortunately - in the USA we seem to be 10 to 20 years behind the times - these schizophrenia treatment guidelines for doctors are only rarely updated by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). You can find the 2004 Schizophrenia Treatment Guidelines put out by the APA here (scroll to bottom of page):

2004 USA APA Schizophrenia Treatment Guideline
http://psychiatryonline.org/guidelines

Though - there does seem to be a “work in progress draft of a new guideline” here, from 2010:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0ahUKEwjbrNGL4_nTAhVL52MKHXzqCikQFgguMAA&url=https%3A%2F%2Fpsychiatryonline.org%2Fpb%2Fassets%2Fraw%2Fsitewide%2Fpractice_guidelines%2Fguidelines%2Fschizophrenia.pdf&usg=AFQjCNHOAt4CZsxAQdC05iPrTPFxSuSzpA&sig2=lPjB0Qp28YpkWMmHEL1Ynw

anon79999497 · May 18, 2017, 8:56pm

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

The RANZCP guidelines for Schizophrenia: Why is our practice so far short of our recommendations, and what can we do about it?

O Nielssen, P McGorry, D Castle and C Galletly, The Australian and New Zealand journal of psychiatry, Jul 2017

The new RANZCP guidelines for the treatment of schizophrenia and related disorders highlights what we know works. In this paper, we examine why patients so often fail to benefit from this knowledge and why clinical practice falls so far short of the recommended standard. Instead of the continuous improvement that we expect of health care in general, in psychiatry we face an accelerating decline in systems of care. There has been a sustained underinvestment in public mental health care and a shared failure by State and Federal governments to construct and commit to a governance and funding model that can deliver the standard of care that is available in other major non-communicable diseases, and which we know is equally possible for severe mental illness. This paper sets out some of the reasons for the poor quality of care received by many people with schizophrenia and related disorders in Australia, and describes ways that care could be improved. In particular, we recommend an explicit statement of what constitutes an adequate standard of care, for people at all stages of these illnesses. This would help provide transparency about whether the care provided by mental health services achieves these benchmarks, and enable publication of results comparing the performance of different states and regional services. Patients and families, as well as professional, consumer and carer organizations would then be able to see clearly where the deficits are and demand resources and care that match the recommendations.