The Catalan Society of Clinical Psychology presented a report in Girona in which it maintains that community mental health care in Catalonia operates with a fragmented network of 71 provider entities that operate independently. The document was released during the XXV National Congress and VI International Congress of Clinical Psychology of the Spanish Society of Clinical Psychology.
The study identifies the main gap between institutional discourse and daily practice in the system's actual capacity to plan and respond. While social demand increases, the scientific entity states that political rhythms, provider dispersion, and the lack of homogeneous public data are deteriorating clinical care.
The report identifies 71 entities in the network providing community care
The SCPC-ACAPIR maintains that community mental health care depends on 71 provider entities that work with their own criteria and different business policies. This structure, it adds, hinders a unified organization of resources throughout Catalonia.
From Girona, the entity suggests that this fragmentation complicates any effective health planning. To this dispersion, it adds the pace of politics and the pressure to respond quickly to growing social demand, two factors that, in its opinion, are affecting clinical care.
Training positions barely changed in three years
The report also focuses on the evolution of specialized training, one of the indicators it uses to measure the system's future capacity. In the last three years, PIR positions only increased by one in all of Catalonia.
In the same period, adult psychiatry positions did not change, specialized mental health nursing positions grew by three, and family medicine positions decreased by four. The comparison reinforces the entity's thesis about the gap between care needs and the resources available to support them.
Furthermore, the scientific society demands that the public administration provide periodic and transparent information about the population's needs and about the existing services and professionals. The entity considers it difficult to plan without precise knowledge of the actual number of staff and operational resources.
The entity asks to measure quality and not just the volume of activity
Another of the document's axes questions how the system's functioning is evaluated today. The SCPC-ACAPIR indicates that current indicators prioritize the quantity of care provided and relegate the quality of the intervention to the background.
For this reason, it proposes reviewing the evaluation of results to incorporate the real impact of assistance on patients. The report was presented in Girona with the title Mental health in Catalonia between institutional discourse and real practice, within the state and international congress of clinical psychology.