Description
Since the early 1970s, delivery of care to people who are consid ered to suffer from chronic psychotic disturbances has been at a crossroads. In 1983, the European Regional Office of the World Health Organization (WHO), within its health economics pro gramme, encouraged international research on the economic impli cations of alternative strategies of care for those patients. Origi nally, it was intended to compare at least two or more strategies of managing chronic psychotics, especially strategies which place dif ferent emphasis on inpatient and outpatient care. Instead of designing a fully coordinated, multinational, multi centre study based on a mutually agreed on study protocol, we de cided on the following: – To meet with researchers interested in the social, psychological, and economic features of health care for chronic psychotic pa tients – To stimulate ongoing research projects or to initiate new ones – To discuss quite different approaches from international and – terdisciplinary points of view – To review and revise the diversified end products of such an open research process For this purpose, we outlined a broad range of topics which could be included in the study: – Methodological problems of evaluation in this field – Social and economic implications of psychiatric deinstitutiona- zation – Scenarios of various degrees of deinstitutionalization – Assessment of (hospital) costs of the treatment for chronic sc- zophrenic and other psychotic patients – Public and private costs of the main treatment strategies – Time-expenditure analyses of chronic psychotic patients
