BACKGROUND The aim of this paper is to assess the mental health system in Brazil in relation to the human resources and the services available to the population. METHODS The World Health Organization Assessment Instrument for Mental Health Systems (WHO AIMS) was recently applied in Brazil. This paper will analyse data on the following sections of the WHO-AIMS: a) mental health services; and b...

With the blooming of online social media applications, Community Question Answering (CQA) services have become one of the most important online resources for information and knowledge seekers. A large number of high quality question and answer pairs have been accumulated, which allow users to not only share their knowledge with others, but also interact with each other. Accordingly, volumes of ...

Based on: • Zeltyn & Mandelbaum. Call Centers with Impatient Customers: Many-Server Asymptotics of the M/M/n+G Queue. Submitted to QUESTA. • Mandelbaum & Zeltyn. The Impact of Customers’ Patience on Delay and Abandonment: Some Empirically-Driven Experiments with the M/M/n+G Queue, OR Spectrum (2004) 26:377-411. • Dimensioning Call Centers with Abandonment. Research in progress (with Borst, Mand...

BACKGROUND Relatively little is known about the relationship between psychosocial crises and treatment costs for persons with schizophrenia. This naturalistic prospective study assessed the association of recent crises with mental health treatment costs among persons receiving treatment for schizophrenia. METHODS Data were drawn from a large multi-site, non-interventional study of schizophren...

The extensive utilization of paraprofessionals as therapeutic agents in National Institute of Mental Health (N.I.M.H.) funded community mental health centers (Gottesfeld, Rhee and Parker, 1970; Levenson and Reff, 1970; Sobey, 1970), has brought much attention to the need for inservice staff development (Joint Commission on Mental Illness and Health, 1961; Riessman, 1967; Sobey, 1970). The impor...

OBJECTIVE To investigate trends in the provision of mental health services and financing in Brazil. METHOD Data from DATASUS (the Brazilian Unified Health Computerized System) with free access in the web were collected regarding the number of beds, the development of new community centers, the number of mental health professionals, and costs involved from 1995 to 2005. RESULTS In ten years,...

The two editorials written for this issue of EPS reflect seemingly different views on the 50 years since President Kennedy signed into law the Community Mental Health Centers Act in the United States. However, both Lisa Dixon and Michael Hogan point a similar direction for the future for the US and for other countries. Dixon reports on advances in treatment and implementation of evidence-based ...

The scope of this article is to analyze the implementation of community mental health services in the regional context in Brazil. The article describes the issue of access to community psychosocial centers (CAPS II) in the State of Rio de Janeiro in this decade. By means of a cross-sectional survey, different categories of users of community services were identified. The theoretical models of o...

BACKGROUND The shift from asylum to community care for mental health patients has burdened the providers of primary health care and, more than all, families. As a result, numerous studies [Soc Psychiatry Psychiatr Epidemiol 31:345-348, 1995, J Health Socisl Behav 36:138-150, 1995] have focused on the burden of care experienced by family members living with individuals with severe mental disorde...

The authors study the association between physician leadership styles and leadership effectiveness. Executive directors of community health centers were surveyed (269 respondents; response rate = 40.9 percent) for their perceptions of the medical director's leadership behaviors and effectiveness, using an adapted Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (43 items on a 0-4 point Likert-type scale), ...