Community-based Mental Health Care for People With Severe and Enduring Mental Ill Health (RECOVER-E) Croatia

Bipolar Disorder, Schizophrenia, Severe Depression, Severe Mental Disorder

Community implementation, Community engagement, patient centerednessP, Implementation science, Co-creation, Iterative learning processes

To contribute to improving the level of functioning and quality of life and mental health outcomes for people with severe and enduring mental ill health (SMI) (schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression) by adapting and up scaling the implementation of a community-based service delivery model in Croatia.

For nearly 900 million people living in Europe, mental disorders constitute the most significant yet most neglected public health problem: depression affects an estimated 30.3 million Europeans, and psychotic disorders 5 million Europeans. People with severe and enduring mental ill health want the same things out of life as other citizens but are often placed in a vulnerable position and are hence afforded less opportunities to attain their goals and thus experience a lower quality of life, and have a lower life expectancy compared to the general population. For many countries that have undergone mental health services reform or have health systems in transition, efforts to make such comprehensive community-based mental health services available resulted in short-lived outcomes or are still to demonstrate substantial impact. RECOVER-E's aims to ensure well-functioning community mental health teams in 5 countries in Europe (Macedonia, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, and Montenegro), which will serve as the central node for coordination and provision of care for people with SMI. Our project narrows the implementation gap by going beyond infrastructure changes and pursuing the development of human resource capacity and care pathways that can be distilled in a comprehensive pathway to scale for regional and national decision-makers for uptake after the project's life span. RECOVER-E will: 1) Develop evidence based care pathways and treatment protocols for transition to scale for regional and national decision makers in 5 implementation sites; 2) Establish a peer to peer capacity building partnership in community mental health by linking a European expert panel with key stakeholders in 5 implementation sites to co-create community mental health services for people with SMI) 3) Evaluate intervention elements that will enhance sustainable adoption and implementation of community-based mental health care for people with SMI, by carrying out implementation research.

Croatia