Child psychiatry in the Finnish health care reform: National criteria for treatment access

Pälvi Kaukonen, Raili K. Salmelin, Ilona Luoma, Kaija Puura, Mervi Rutanen, Tarja Pukuri and Tuula Tamminen

Health Policy, 2010, vol. 96, issue 1, 20-27

Abstract: Objectives As a part of the Finnish National Health Care Project, to develop and validate nationwide standardised criteria for assessing the need for non-urgent child psychiatric specialised medical care (SMC).Methods The Finnish criteria tool, a cutpoint measure indicating access to SMC, was developed on the basis of the Western Canada Waiting List Criteria Tool. The Finnish criteria were widely discussed at national level and finally confirmed by a national child psychiatric consensus meeting. The testing data included 949 new cases, aged 5-18 years, from SMC, family guidance clinics, primary health care and child protection.Results The Finnish Child Psychiatric Criteria Tool covers the entire case-mix of child psychiatric disorders. Danger to self or others and psychotic symptoms have been combined into a threshold item. This alone suffices to indicate access to SMC. Sensitivity of the tool was 82% and specificity 74% with cutoff point 16/75.Conclusions Child psychiatric non-urgent SMC is provided in accordance with national criteria, publicly accessible in the Internet. The criteria development process evoked multisectoral discussion on organising child mental health services and, by determining the need of treatment requiring SMC, defined health policy.

Keywords: Health; services; accessibility; Access; criteria; National; criteria; Child; psychiatry (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168-8510(09)00333-9
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:hepoli:v:96:y:2010:i:1:p:20-27

Access Statistics for this article

Health Policy is currently edited by Katrien Kesteloot, Mia Defever and Irina Cleemput

More articles in Health Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu () and ().