NEW TRENDS IN PSYCHIATRIC-CARE

In the process of psychiatric reforms new principles of appropriate service planning emerged. The most important concepts comprise the individualization, normalization, coordination and flexibility of care. Despite enormous changes of psychiatric care based on those new principles mental health services research, evaluating those processes, did not play an important role in this development. One major reason is that evaluation research is not so easy to integrate into the common research model. Ways of adapting the scientific methodology to the given frame of reference are discussed.