The Aftercare Research Program is an outpatient research clinic at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute that will provide the clinical site for the recruitment, pharmacological and psychosocial interventions, and assessments of symptoms and functional outcome for first-episode patients who are participating in research projects in this Center. The primary mission of the Aftercare Program is to provide a structured and high quality clinical care setting within which this Center research can take place. The Aftercare Research Program will provide a centralized and standardized process for screening and diagnosing first-episode schizophrenia patient participants, providing their clinical services, and completing high-quality longitudinal assessments of symptoms, work functioning, and social functioning. As detailed in the budget justification section for this Core, this centralization will result in great savings to the multiple individual projects that involve Aftercare Program patients, compared to costs if these research projects were carried out independently. Furthermore, by utilizing a shared group of first-episode patients, opportunities for integrative data analyses across projects will become available. A second function is to optimize the level of patient participation in Center-related research projects. A third function is to provide a sample of normal subjects, demographically comparable to the first-episode patients, for potential participation in Center-affiliated projects. A fourth function of the Aftercare Research Program is to provide a convenient group of patient volunteers for the piloting of new measures being developed by individual projects and by the Diagnosis and Symptom Assessment Core and the Functional Outcome Core. A fifth function is to offer a research training site for predoctoral and post-doctoral research fellows to encourage development of new translational researchers. Two psychiatrists and three masters level therapists will provide the clinical interventions and research assessments in space allocated to the Program in the UCLA Medical Plaza.
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