municipalities and ggz, together for epa

There are about 200,000 people with Serious Psychiatric Disorders (EPA) in the Netherlands. They face a variety of problems, including structural psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia (psychoses), addiction and severe personality disorders.

Many people with a serious psychiatric disorder receive care, help and support from various sources. The GGZ provides care to this target group in so-called FACT teams, in which usually – but not always – addiction care is also involved. In addition, these people are often known to municipalities, which organize help in many different ways, such as the preliminary field, welfare and specialized help through the neighborhood teams. Often the care and help for these people is not or insufficiently coordinated.

Bringing care and help together is often complicated. All sorts of things get in the way: diagnostics, approaches, professional principles, systems, privacy laws, rules of the payers, language and speech, and modes of organization are often different. Good intentions often fail as a result. However, poor collaboration has enormous effects on the EPA client.

Together with GGZ Friesland, De Friesland (Zilveren Kruis), the Municipalities of Leeuwarden and Súdwest-Fryslân, EHdK developed an approach to achieve effective cooperation. The core of the approach is perseverance, both at the administrative level and at the operational level. Everything is solvable, but it takes time and energy. For the target group, this pays off.

Initial case-level explorations show that significant risks have been prevented in many clients, including unnecessary out-of-home placements and suicides. At the same time, the professionals are very happy with the cooperation. The goal is to roll out this form of cooperation throughout Friesland.

EPA publication

To further explain our approach, we wrote a publication on institutional challenges in caring for people with an EPA background. We did this together with 10 (former) care administrators. In it, we explain how to tackle the problems and offer concrete solutions.

Download publication ↧

Read the publication here

EPA Movies

EHdK colleague Pim Candel, together with the VNG, gave a successful webinar on the renewed EPA approach in the district using as a case example the municipality of Súdwest-Fryslân and the municipality of Leeuwarden Friesland. Did you miss it? You can watch the videos on the right for each part.