Estimation of costs for community mental health services

Abstract

This chapter briefly reviews community mental health services costs and the key methodological points regarding their costing methods. Because of the diversity in the structure of and interventions delivered among community mental health services, it is paramount to identify the components of costs for each service. Comparability across cost studies depends on at least four main issues: the study perspective, the time horizon, the type of service/subject's profile, and the data source. We present one example of costing community mental health services using data from a Brazilian study of costing a center of psychosocial care (CAPS) in the State of São Paulo.