The balance of adult mental health care: provision of core health versus other types of care in eight European countries.

Aims: Although many mental health care systems provide care interventions that are not related to direct health care, little is known about the interfaces between the latter and core health care. 'Core health care' refers to services whose explicit aim is direct clinical treatment which is usually provided by health professionals, i.e.

Standard comparison of local mental health care systems in eight European countries.

Aims: There is a need of more quantitative standardised data to compare local Mental Health Systems (MHSs) across international jurisdictions. Problems related to terminological variability and commensurability in the evaluation of services hamper like-with-like comparisons and hinder the development of work in this area. This study was aimed to provide standard assessment and comparison of MHS in selected local areas in Europe, contributing to a better understanding of MHS and related allocation of resources at local level and to lessen the scarcity in standard service comparison in Europe.

Developing a tool for mapping adult mental health care provision in Europe: the REMAST research protocol and its contribution to better integrated care.

Introduction: Mental health care is a critical area to better understand integrated care and to pilot the different components of the integrated care model. However, there is an urgent need for better tools to compare and understand the context of integrated mental health care in Europe.

Method: The REMAST tool (REFINEMENT MApping Services Tool) combines a series of standardised health service research instruments and geographical information systems (GIS) to develop local atlases of mental health care from the perspective of horizontal and vertical integrated care.

[Counselling customers with psychotropic vs. cardiovascular prescriptions: a survey among Austrian community pharmacists].

Background: Prescriptions for psychotropic drugs in general and their share of all prescriptions have substantially risen over the last decades. Thus, also counselling by pharmacists becomes more important in this area. This study focuses on how community pharmacists see their own role when counselling persons with prescriptions for psychotropic medication and how this differs from counselling persons with other types of prescriptions.