RESUMO
OBJECTIVE: To describe the availability of outpatient, inpatient and community based psychiatric care in 21 rural districts and 3 cities of Sachsen-Anhalt, one of the federal states of eastern Germany, with rapid changes and developments in psychiatric care over the last ten years. METHOD: Information about services was obtained from files of the "Committee for Issues of Psychiatric Care in Sachsen-Anhalt", which was established in 1992 with six multiprofessional "visitation groups" to perform inspections of all institutions providing psychiatric service to the community. Reports about these regular visits followed semi-standardized protocols. The ESMS was used to classify 365 institutions visited between 1996 and 1998, and numbers of places per 100 000 inhabitants were used to compare the 24 regions of the state. RESULTS: The visitation protocols as the main source of information and the ESMS as a classification tool proved to be useful. The interrater-reliability was high, and the validity of the data was supported by other official statistics. Outpatient care was provided by 4 psychiatrists and 3 psychologists in private practice per 100 000 inhabitants, which is low compared to the German mean. 10 secure beds (forensic psychiatry), 48 acute beds, 13 elective beds and 13 day hospital places per 100 000 inhabitants were available for inpatient care, with a marked shortage of beds in the southern and eastern regions of the state. Non-acute non-hospital residential services with indefinite stay and 24 hour support accumulated to 240 places per 100 000, with regional differences ranging from less than 100 to more than 1000. About 80 % among the residents of these institutions were considered as suffering from "mental retardation", suggesting some persisting institutionalism. All other residential services taken together (time-limited or with less than 24 hour support) came to 24 places per 100 000. Sheltered workshop places corresponded to the number of persons in residential homes. Other facilities offering paid work or work-related activities were scarce; some services providing structured activity or social contact were available in urban agglomerations. The data about the frequency of contacts in outpatient and community services are limited. CONCLUSIONS: Psychiatric care in Germany is fragmentary, as regards providers and funding. Information collected by the "Committee for Issues of Psychiatric Care in Sachsen-Anhalt", taken mainly from visitation protocols, was sufficient to establish a general survey over 24 regions of this federal state. We propose to repeat this approach regularly to monitor developments in the field of social psychiatry for further planning and interventions. Overall, our results show that the aims formulated in the German "Inquiry into Psychiatry" ("Psychiatrie-Enquete") have not been fully accomplished (e.g. the preferential status of outpatient versus in-patient services).
