Financing the Psychiatric Pathway: From Issues to Practice

In terms of public health, the financing of a care activity has several objectives: a main objective of relative improvement in the health status of a population. Secondary objectives of efficiency of the actions undertaken to achieve the main objective. In short, funding must promote the right care in the right place at the right time with the right human and material resources. Classically, there are two categories of funding: retrospective and prospective. Retrospective funding has the advantage of encouraging supply and therefore a certain accessibility to the detriment of the sometimes-questionable relevance of care. Prospective funding has the advantage of encouraging standard practices, sometimes to the detriment of the accessibility of certain types of care. Furthermore, prospective financing raises the question of the standard used: the usual or average practice, best practices, etc. Developing funding according to the psychiatric pathway therefore implies asking all these questions not only from a macro point of view but also at the heart of the organisations: what is the right care? The right time? The right place? And the right resource?