ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION. The psychiatric discipline was responsible for picking patient candidates for the project, from a previously selected pool, according to criteria agreed upon by all disciplines. After selection we studied each patient carefully in order to determine diagnosis, presence and degree of deterioration, oscillations of clinical manifestations, and response to the project ward where patients were subjected to a modified “total push” regime. Our goal was to familiarize ourselves sufficiently with the vicissitudes of each patient’s clinical course so that we would be able to evaluate later changes with reasonable accuracy. Following operation, patients were seen frequently during the early postoperative period and less frequently after the first 3 months.
