The European diagram of mental health services and its application in sector IB (Burlada)

Abstract

The evaluation of services is a key subject in the field of mental health. In recent years research activity has been centred on the description, organisation and utilisation of resources, as well as on the establishment of the needs and priorities of the latter and the evaluation of costs. New instruments have been developed to carry out the analysis of services. The elaboration of these has not been easy since there is no international consensus on the description and classification of services, there is a lack of a standardised glossary of terms regarding these services and because of the absence of standard recommendations for the processes of validation of tools. This problem increases if one bears in mind that the units of analysis are not individual but an ensemble of programs, situations, or of resources and care modules. The European Service Mapping Schedule is one of the first instruments aimed at describing the organisation of services and at measuring or quantifying their provision in a specific catchment area. This questionnaire employs a system of trees or diagrams that permit the localisation of services and their level of utilisation by the users of the selected area. The application of the European Service Mapping Schedule in Sector IB-Burlada (Navarra) proved to be simple with respect to the localisation of services. The utilisation of resources proved to be more complicated since the present databases do not provide this information.