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Purpose
Rehabilitation professionals are faced with judging and describing the social-medicine status of their patients. Rehabilitation professionals must know the core concepts of acute unfitness for work, psychological capacities, and long-term work capacity.
Acquiring and applying this knowledge, requires training. The research question is if and to what extent medical professionals and students' knowledge changes after social medicine training.
Methods
This quasi-experimental study was carried out in the real-life context of social medicine training. Psychology students (n = 42), physicians/psychotherapists (i.e. state-licensed health professionals) (n = 44) and medical assistant professionals (n = 29) were trained. Their social medicine knowledge was measured before and after training by a 10-min expert-approved and content valid knowledge questionnaire.
Three free-text questions had to be answered on the essential aspects of present and prognostic work ability and psychological capacities.
Answers were rated for correctness by two experts. Paired t tests and variance analysis have been calculated for group comparisons.
Results
All groups improved their social medicine knowledge from the pre- to the post-test. The students started with the lowest level of knowledge in the pre-test.
After training, 69% of the physicians/psychotherapists and 56.8% of the medical assistant professionals, but only 7% of the students, obtained maximum scores for naming psychological capacities.
Conclusions
Social medicine knowledge increased after a training course consisting of eight lessons. The increase was greater for medical assistant professionals and physicians/psychotherapists than for students. Social medicine training must be adjusted to the trainee groups' knowledge levels.
Purpose Persons with work-anxieties are especially endangered for work capacity impairment and sick leave. Work capacity impairment is not directly due to symptoms but due to illness-related capacity disorders. Work capacity impairments can be described on different dimensions (e.g., social interaction, decision making and judgment, endurance, mobility). Understanding the type of work capacity impairment is important for reintegration interventions. This is the first study to investigate work capacity impairment in risk patients with different work-anxieties. Results Patients with different work-anxieties were impaired in different capacity dimensions: Work-related social anxiety went along with clinically relevant impairment in capacity of assertiveness (M = 2.40), anxiety of insufficiency went along with impaired capacity of endurance (M = 2.20), and work-related generalized worrying was accompanied by impairment in the capacity for decision making (M = 1.82). Specific capacity impairment dimensions were related to sick leave duration, while a global work ability prognosis was not. Conclusions The capacity approach is useful to describe work impairment more precisely and beyond symptoms. On this basis, reintegration-focusing interventions such as capacity training (e.g., social interaction training) or work adjustment (e.g., reducing exposure with interactional work tasks) can be initiated.
Capacity-Oriented Behavior Therapy in Mental Disorders Mental disorders come along with the impairment of activities and capacities of daily live. Behavior therapy often uses capacity trainings for improving compensatory behavior, beside symptom reduction as such. This article gives an overview on how behavior therapy techniques can be used to improve compensatory behavior in different capacity domains that were conceptually derived from the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) and which are often impaired in mental disorders.