HELPfullR Documentation

Health Evaluation and Linkage to Primary Care

Description

The HELP study was a clinical trial for adult inpatients recruited from a detoxification unit. Patients with no primary care physician were randomized to receive a multidisciplinary assessment and a brief motivational intervention or usual care, with the goal of linking them to primary medical care.

Usage

data(HELPfull)

Format

A data frame with 1472 observations on the following variables.

Details

Eligible subjects were adults, who spoke Spanish or English, reported alcohol, heroin or cocaine as their first or second drug of choice, resided in proximity to the primary care clinic to which they would be referred or were homeless. Patients with established primary care relationships they planned to continue, significant dementia, specific plans to leave the Boston area that would prevent research participation, failure to provide contact information for tracking purposes, or pregnancy were excluded.

Subjects were interviewed at baseline during their detoxification stay and follow-up interviews were undertaken every 6 months for 2 years. A variety of continuous, count, discrete, and survival time predictors and outcomes were collected at each of these five occasions.

This dataset is a superset of the HELPmiss and HELPrct datasets which include far fewer variables. Full details of the survey instruments are available at the following link.

Source

https://nhorton.people.amherst.edu/help/

References

Samet JH, Larson MJ, Horton NJ, Doyle K, Winter M, and Saitz R. Linking alcohol and drug-dependent adults to primary medical care: A randomized controlled trial of a multi-disciplinary health intervention in a detoxification unit. Addiction, 2003; 98(4):509-516.

See Also

HELPrct, and HELPmiss.

Examples

data(HELPfull)