200 Chapter 7 involved in additional controversy and continues dividing academics, practitioners and patients [7-9]. Second, the studies cover three related but distinct key policy levers in granting people with mental health conditions access to support (Figure 1). Chapter 3 relates directly to coverage by examining the impact of increased cost-sharing in access to care. Chapter 4 studies eligibility granted by long-term care assessors for a defined package of supported housing. Notably, the results of this Chapter highlight how eligibility is needed but insufficient to translate coverage into access to services. Chapter 5 covers the availability of services, measured through the use of psychologists full-time equivalent as a proxy for psychotherapy available. While certainly an important determinant of access to care, availability is more distal to it than eligibility or coverage. This Chapter focuses only on the provider side, looking at GP prescription decisions when faced with changes in psychotherapy availability. Importantly, and as depicted in the schematic representation of Figure 1, the interventions were also chosen and studied using an equity lens, uncovering distributional effects and impact on mental health inequalities. Figure 1. Policy levers in granting people with mental health conditions access to support: ideal scenario of health and social care contributing to reduce the mental health gap Last, and perhaps most importantly, the choice of the interventions, programs and policies was influenced by the methodological requirements to perform sound and credible quasiexperimental evaluations. This means that their implementation or existing set-up should provide a certain degree of exogenous variation to be explored. Furthermore, access to appropriate knowledge and data to investigate the (mostly non-testable) identifying assumptions should be available. Unfortunately, these requirements meant several policyrelevant interventions could not be robustly studied through quasi-experiments.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjY0ODMw