99 Patients’ and volunteers’ experiences with a social network intervention 4 METHODS Study design This qualitative study was conducted alongside an ongoing mono-center, open-label RCT with two parallel groups at Inforsa Forensic Outpatient Care, a department of Arkin Mental Health Institute in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. In this RCT, the effects of an additive informal social network intervention, hereafter referred to as forensic network coaching (FNC) were compared to treatment as usual (TAU) among forensic psychiatric outpatients. In this study, a total of 102 forensic psychiatric outpatients were randomly allocated to either TAU with the addition of FNC or TAU alone after the first (baseline) assessment. More details about the RCT can be found in our published study protocol (Swinkels et al., 2020); results are presented elsewhere (Swinkels et al., 2023c). The study was approved by the Medical Ethics Committee of the Amsterdam University Medical Center (NL60308.029.17) and preregistered at the Netherlands Trial Register (NTR7163, date of registration: 16/04/2018). Participants Forensic psychiatric outpatients eligible for participation in the RCT were recruited at Inforsa Forensic Outpatient Care if they were at least 3 months in treatment, aged 16 years or older, diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder (DSM-IV-TR/5), identified with limitations with respect to their social network and social participation by a research assistant using the Self-Sufficiency Matrix (Fassaert et al., 2014), and if patients were not completely satisfied with their social relationships assessed with the Manchester Short Assessment of Quality of Life (Priebe et al., 1999). Patients were excluded if they were suffering from acute psychotic symptoms and acute suicidality according to the clinician or DSM-IV-TR/5 criteria, severe addiction problems that required immediate intervention or hospitalization, severe aggression problems, or if they were already participating in other scientific research projects at Inforsa. Written informed consent was obtained from patients prior to baseline assessment. Coaches were volunteers from the local community of Amsterdam who were recruited and selected by De Regenboog Groep [The Rainbow Group], an informal care institute providing volunteer services for people with social or mental challenges who are lonely and/or have a psychiatric and/or addiction background. All coaches agreed to volunteering in the context of a research project. Eligibility of coaches was checked during a face-to-face interview with an experienced coordinator of De Regenboog Groep according to the standard procedures of the institute. Coaches were eligible if they were aged between 23
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