Mental healthcare currently offers a wide variety of options. In the creation of this care offering, we strive to meet the diverse needs in terms of mental healthcare for children, young people/adolescents as well as adults and the elderly. Our goal is to provide care that is consistent with each patient’s environment, taking into account their individual needs and the unique context of their environment.
In doing so, we encourage the cooperation of the various care actors within the mental health networks so that children, adolescents and adults with mental health problems can be helped quickly according to their individual needs. We realise that the strength of the healthcare system lies in collaboration and the flexibility to evolve with changing needs.
Partly by investing in psychological care in the 1st line and partly by investing in crisis and long-term care teams, liaison functions and residential intensive treatment units, we seek to provide a mental health care offer for everyone’s needs.
In this way, we aim to develop a stepped integrated mental health care system of care consisting of coordinated evidence-based services that increase or decrease in intensity depending on each person’s needs. The care pathway may begin at any service and people may require recurring episodes of counseling or treatment at different levels in the stepped system. We are aware that many components of such a tiered system of care are already present in the current supply of care, but there are also still gaps. The challenge for the future is to fill those gaps in order to best meet needs and, as mentioned above, to strive for better cooperation between all actors and services in order to achieve optimal continuity of care.