Background: The person-centered care approach has been little tested in inpatient settings for persons with schizophrenia. An intervention, PersonCentered Psychosis Care (PCPC), was created to increase person-centered care through an educational intervention for staff. The education had a participatory approach where participants were involved in shaping the education and creating projects aimed at care development. The PCPC intervention focused on the patient’s narrative, the creation of a partnership between the patient and staff, and on coming to an agreement between the patient and staff concerning the care. The present study aims to compare staff experienced workload and ward level data before and after implementation of the intervention.

Methods: The study was carried out on 4 hospital wards (43 beds) at the Psychosis Clinic, Gothenburg, Sweden. Data was collected during a 6-month pre-intervention period, followed by an implementation period of 3  years, and finally a post intervention data collection period (9 months). During both data collection periods, one nurse per ward filled out a measure of daily subjective workload (a VAS scale with 0 indicating no burden at all and 10 indicating the highest imaginable burden). Additional ward level data (length of hospital stay, involuntary interventions, rehospitalization rates) were collected via the clinic’s electronic monitoring system.

Results: The pre-intervention ratings (n=505) showed a mean subjective workload of 5.48 (SD=1.94). The post intervention workload (n=465) showed a mean of 4.51 (SD=2.08) which represents a significant reduction of experienced workload (t (968) = p <.0005). Analyses regarding length of hospital stay, involuntary interventions, and rehospitalization rates are underway and will be presented.

Discussion: The findings indicate an improvement in the work environment for hospital staff and provide a quantitative result in line with staff experiences previously reported in our focus group study. The before and after design has its limitations, but the positive findings motivate further testing with a more rigorous design such as a cluster randomized study.