Identifying and measuring service use data for youth in need of mental health care

Background/Objectives: Mental illnesses lead to high burden for patients as well as for the society. As more interventions, become available and appear to be effective, decisions about allocation of scarce resources are becoming more difficult. To inform these decisions, insight into the balance between costs and effects can be helpful. This information can be derived from economic evaluation studies. As these data are used to derive costs estimates, the importance of accurate identification and measurement of service use cannot be over-estimated for such studies. And yet there are considerable debates about how…