Complex care needs from a mental health perspective-a scoping review: Abstracts from the Symposium of the Belgian Association of Public Health 2024

Background

A well-known statistic is that one in four people will suffer from a mental health issue at one point in their lives. A group behind this statistic that is hard to define, to characterize and seemingly even harder to care for are those with so-called complex care needs. For many people with complex mental health care needs (CCN) there is a mental health care gap, resulting in unmet care needs, fragmented care, poor continuity and quality of care and health outcomes, service overuse, underuse or misuse.The issue of unmet needs in people with CCN is multifactorial and multisectoral and solutions will have to be addressed in the same way. To do this properly, it is first necessary to get a clear understanding of the concept of complex care needs. This scoping review aims to validate the concept of complex care needs from a mental health (care) perspective by mapping key characteristics described in literature.

Materials and methods

The scoping review will be conducted following the steps described in the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) Manual for Evidence Synthesis. Databases PubMed, Ovid, Cochrane and Social Services Abstracts will be searched. Grey literature will be searched for through Google Scholar. The scoping review is planned to be submitted in March 2024.

Results

Data will be reported descriptively. There will be a frequency count of characteristics mentioned in the literature, which will be reported in a table, complemented by a narrative description of the results. Preliminary results identify amongst others substance (ab)use, mental or physical disability, socio-economic vulnerability including poverty and housing insecurity and involvement with the criminal justice system as some of the complicating factors experienced by people with severe mental illness.

Conclusion

The findings of the scoping review will lead to a working definition of complex care needs from a mental health perspective and the development of a measurement tool. This will be used to study the care use (including overuse, underuse, misuse, interruptions in care use, …) and to develop improved care programs for this population. Intersectionality and complexity science could provide a framework for this.