New plan enables psychiatric patients to leave clinic

Prague, Aug 16 (CTK) - Thousands of patients suffering from depression and other types of mental disorder might leave Czech clinics for home treatment soon within a project prepared by doctors that is to profoundly change the country's system of psychiatric care, daily Hospodarske noviny (HN) writes Thursday.

The project, to be launched next year, reckons with a large part of the present ten thousand hospitalised psychiatric patients being treated by mobile teams of doctors who will be visiting them at home, HN writes.

The teams will monitor schizophrenic patients, for example, it says.

For people suffering from depression, which is currently the most spread mental disease, a network of all-day "mental health centres" will be established near their place of residence, HN writes.

The number of patients with psychical troubles has been growing. However, psychiatric care in the Czech Republic ranks among the least effective in the world, though it costs almost 10 billion crowns a year. A major part of the treatment rests in patients being treated in hospitals, which has been repeatedly criticised by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), HN writes.

A study worked out in the biggest of the country's 20 psychiatric clinics, Prague-Bohnice, shows that the present 1200 psychiatric beds in Prague can be reduced halved after the network of community centres and non-stop out-patient offices is established, HN writes.

"Toda's structure corresponds to the times when medicines did not exist and everyone had to be taken to hospital," the paper quotes deputy health minister Marek Zenisek as saying.

The Health Ministry wants to spend six billion crowns from the EU funds on the transformation project, the daily adds.

"We have some patients who would definitely manage life outside, but we cannot release them as they would lack the necessary health and social services," Prague-Bohnice clinic director Martin Holly told HN.

In the Czech Republic, psychiatric care knows only two extreme solutions. Either the patient visits a psychiatrist once or twice a month to take his/her medicine, or he/she is admitted to hospital. There is nothing to interconnect the services of the 20 clinics and 800 out-patient offices, the paper writes.

Such interconnection, including mobile teams of assistants, is crucial now that the number of psychiatric patients is steeply growing, HN continues.

In Prague, 14 all-day mental health centres are to start to be established next year to test the transformation project. If it succeeds, similar changes would follow in regions, HN writes.

The reduction of the number of hospital beds will also help the patients staying at clinics where the present outdated rooms, often with more than ten beds and otherwise almost empty, will be replaced by two-bed rooms with standard furniture, HN writes.

Nevertheless, the Czech Republic does not plan to abolish psychiatric clinics completely, like Italy, for example, the paper continues.

"We prefer reducing and upgrading a part of our services and move them closer to people," Czech Psychiatric Society's head Jiri Raboch is quoted as saying.