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