Since the early 1970s, delivery of care to people who are consid- ered to suffer from chronic psychotic disturbances has been at a crossroads. In 1983, the European Regional Office of the World Health Organization (WHO), within its health economics pro- gramme, encouraged international research on the economic impli- cations of alternative strategies of care for those patients. Origi- nally, it was intended to compare at least two or more strategies of managing chronic psychotics, especially strategies which place dif- ferent emphasis on inpatient and outpatient care.
Instead of designing a fully coordinated, multinational, multi- centre study based on a mutually agreed on study protocol, we de- cided on the following: - To meet with researchers interested in the social, psychological, and economic features of health care for chronic psychotic pa- tients - To stimulate ongoing research projects or to initiate new ones - To discuss quite different approaches from international and - terdisciplinary points of view - To review and revise the diversified end products of such an open research process For this purpose, we outlined a broad range of topics which could be included in the study: - Methodological problems of evaluation in this field - Social and economic implications of psychiatric deinstitutiona- zation - Scenarios of various degrees of deinstitutionalization - Assessment of (hospital) costs of the treatment for chronic sc- zophrenic and other psychotic patients - Public and private costs of the main treatment strategies - Time-expenditure analyses of chronic psychotic patients