Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a serious psychiatric illness with a high lifetime prevalence rate and causes major clinical, social and economic burden to patients and their family. Despite that more than 40 antidepressants with various mechanisms are available on the market, half of patients fail to achieve remission with optimized medication treatment because of unsatisfactory efficacy, frequent intolerability and poor compliance of pharmacotherapies. However, Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is a safe and effective therapy which has many previous evidences to improve the treatment of depression. The aim of this project is to build up a TCM clinical daycare model for depression patients, and to establish a teaching platform for TCM trainees.~The TCM daycare model will be provided by a team organized by doctors, nurses, pharmacists, psychologist, nutritionist and case managers. This model will provide a comprehensive TCM care system to improve the clinical symptoms and quality of life of depression patients.
The teaching platform of the TCM daycare clinics for depression patients will provide a good clinical training environment for the trainees. They can learn how to take care of depression patients by the lectures and the clinical practice experiences in the daycare clinics. They can also learn a holistic approach, a patient-centered healthcare service. This teaching model will strengthen the clinical training of TCM and enhance the international competitiveness of TCM doctors.