Effectiveness and Equivalence of an Internet-based Virtual Classroom Intervention for Psychosomatic Aftercare

Outpatient psychosomatic aftercare after inpatient rehabilitation pursues the goal of helping patients to transfer the achieved rehabilitation result in everyday life and professional life. The Hanover Curriculum has been established as a treatment programme for psychosomatic aftercare. This comprises 25 weekly group sessions and two single therapies at the beginning and at the end of the therapy. In Germany a vast majority of rehabilitants in a psychosomatic rehabilitation clinic has an indication for psychosomatic aftercare, but it is used only by less than half of the patients due to a lack of aftercare therapists. If there is a therapist in the patient's vicinity, there are often long travelling times to the therapist or the patients might feel stigmatized participating in a face-to-face therapy. Thus, the expansion of internet-based aftercare services is recommended. Advantages are that they can be carried out at home, possible cost and time savings and improvement of the care situation. Several meta-analyses provide high evidence for the effectiveness of internet-based therapy offers in depressive and anxiety disorders that are frequent among psychosomatic rehabilitation patients. First randomised controlled studies show that internet-based aftercare services can lead to a symptomatic improvement and to a reduction of relapses. It is currently not clear whether established aftercare concepts, such as the Curriculum Hannover, are also effective in an internet-based format (Curriculum Hannover Online). The present project consists of a superiority study, examining whether participation in Curriculum- Hannover-Online leads to a stronger adoption and maintenance of the health improvements achieved in inpatient rehabilitation in comparison to care as usual, and an equivalnece study, examining, wether the Curriculum Hannover Online is an equivalent treatment option to the existing face-to-face aftercare therapy.