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