Services Use of Children and Adolescents before Admission to Psychiatric Inpatient Care.

DISCUSSION: Mentally ill children and adolescents use a broad range of services across sectors before admission to hospital. Service use is associated with specific symptoms of the disease, yet not with the diagnosis. For some carers, this is linked to considerable financial burden because many of those services are only partly publicly funded or are not part of the health sector. A limitation of the study is the uncertainty of self-reports. Furthermore, we do not know whether the services used were needs-based and effective, and what the utilisation patterns of non-hospitalised children and adolescents are. IMPLICATIONS FOR HEALTH POLICIES: Mental health policy for children and adolescents in Austria needs to focus on how to organise a needs-oriented and coordinated services mix across different sectors that is equally accessible regardless of the patients' socio-economic background. IMPLICATIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH: To support planning, further research on the factors that predict service use and on the cost-effectiveness of services is required. PMID: 27453457 [PubMed - in process]
Source: Journal of Mental Health Policy and Economics - Category: Psychiatry Tags: J Ment Health Policy Econ Source Type: research