Predictors of Treatment Dropout in Long Term Treatment Facilities

This essay discusses the predictors of treatment dropout in long term treatment facilities. This topic is worth examining because patient dropouts often lead to consequential relapses. Premature dropout from treatment is a widespread problem that limits overall effectiveness of treatment and exacerbates health, legal and financial consequences. The contrary is true: increased patient retention and participation results into positive treatment, greater abstinence and fewer psychological problems. Early dropout predictors which could be related either to program or client factors are of special concern to medical practitioners.

There are pretreatment factors that predicted dropout, especially for substance-abuse patients. They include younger age, less education and being unemployed. There are also additional socioeconomic and demographic variables that predict treatment dropout. These are: legal history, social isolation, living situation, marital status, race and gender. Other patient specific predictors include psychiatric co-morbidity and treatment factors.

Low severity of drug abuse problems and low dependence symptoms lead to low motivation for medication. Similarly, increased drug abuse and low cognitive functioning also leads to dropouts. They also identified risk factors associated with in-treatment predictors for dropout. For one, the adequacy or lack of support in terms of empathy, care and helpfulness received by patients from the treatment program influenced the level of dropouts. The laxity of control exercised by program staff: strictness on rules and punishment for clients who break them predicted the degree of treatment dropout.

Additionally, distress tolerance was identified as one of the key predictors of treatment dropout that has led to failure of abstinence attempts especially among gamblers, smokers and users of illicit drugs. She defined tolerance as the client’s ability to endure either physical or psychological distress. She said that typically, people use drugs to alleviate distress and achieve better mood. In attempt to prevent relapse during early treatment, clients who cannot tolerate distress that comes with the quit attempt suffer from increased stress and consequently drop out of treatment.

In conclusion, premature dropout from treatment limits overall effectiveness of treatment and exacerbates health, legal and financial consequences. Some of the predictors for medication dropout in long term treatment facilities have been identified to include socioeconomic and demographic variables. Others are psychiatric co-morbidity and treatment factors.