Case-management: een functionele organisatievorm van de zorg voor de chronisch psychiatrische patiënt
This article provides a compact presentation of the position and content of case-management in the Dutch situation. There is a correlation between case-management and the changing opinions about the organisation of mental health care. Here-in institute-oriented thinking is replaced by client-oriented thinking. These changing opinions motivated two institutions to develop a joint case-management project for extremely hard to treat chronic patients. Experiences after one year are reported. These experiences were positive both for the case-managers and for the patients, their relatives and other-co-workers. The objectives of the project were achieved. The conclusion is that this case-management model is a valuable instrument to garantee the continuity of care for a group of chronic psychiatric patients, who use several mental health care institutions.