Keyword: action plan

This past February, Quebec’s Ministry of Health and Social Services published an evaluation of the implementation of the province’s Mental Health Action Plan (MHAP) 2005-2010¹. The report states that progress has been made in implementing many aspects of the MHAP and that noticeable improvements to service delivery and organization have occurred in regions where implementation efforts have been successful. However, the evaluation also revealed that full implementation of most local, regional and national measures remained incomplete both across and within regions, and that specified service targets have, with few exceptions, failed to be met.

Quebec’s Mental Health Action (MHAP) 2005-2010 proposes a reorganization of mental health services based on hierarchized care. This hierarchization consists of defining the care provided and the clients served by different service providers, as well as the interface management mechanisms between levels of care. Its objective is to improve the efficiency of the care system through better complementarity between service providers and by ensuring an increased continuity of care between them.

Until the 1960s, the majority of mental health problems were treated in mental hospitals. Operating essentially as a daycare service, they often took in several thousand “patients”, and offered very little in structured treatments. However, things changed very quickly as a result of several factors: the introduction of antipsychotics, the development of medical specialization programs in psychiatry and, above all, patients’ criticisms regarding their living conditions in these hospitals.