Mental Health Care Delivery: Innovations, Impediments and Implementation - Tapa dura

"This important and timely volume has a scope and depth rarely matched by previous publications. Its essays are written by some of the most internationally distinguished researchers, practitioners, or policy planners in the field....The book will be especially useful for giving students a sense of current issues in the sociology of health as well providing them with an introduction to current research by medical sociologists." Contemporary Sociology

"This multidisciplinary examination of these three groups from an international perspective is revealing and provocative. It provides insights, both old and new, about system design and impediments to implementation." Emile Bendit, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease

"I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in mental health policy and mental health services. The relative emphasis on public policy and research issues in other countries is a decided plus....For edited work, this is an exceptional volume. I learned a good deal from it. So might you." Charles A. Kiesler, Contemporary Psychology

The provision of effective mental health services, at a reasonable cost, to all sections of the population is one of the most pressing problems facing clinicians, planners and administrators of mental health services in the industrialised countries. Changes in paradigms for mental health care delivery are accelerating, and are likely to culminate in the 1990s in major shifts in many countries. This book reviews the emerging patterns of health care delivery in different western countries, outlining the innovations of recent years and analysing some of the impediments to their full implementation. The contributors are all prominent experts in mental health services, whose chapters comprise an up-to-date account of many of the most important issues in mental health care delivery today. The text falls into three sections. Part I describes a number of innovations in the community care of psychiatric patients, including programmes for psychotic patients, primary care based psychiatric services for non-psychotics and emergency services in community settings. Part II examines the main impediments to their systematic implementation whether sociopolitical, administrative, economic or professional. Part III integrates the book, provides an overview, and details some specific issues in the implementation of innovation in mental health care delivery.