Dutch mental health care
In the Netherlands mental health care services are provided by public
organizations which are divided over three compartments: primary care,
generalized mental health care and specialized mental health care. Over
the past ten years the nationwide policy was focused on a further
transition from specialized care to generalized care and even primary
care, including a rather ambitious reduction of clinical inpatient
services (30% ) and a further development of community-based outpatient
care, which had to integrate health care and social care in patients own
environment as much as possible.
At this moment mental health spending in the Netherlands is 8% of
overall health care spending, which is the median of a recent survey in
14 different western countries6