[Two Years of Ward-Equivalent In-Patient Treatment (StaeB) in retrospect]

Since January 1, 2018, ward-equivalent treatment has been a service provided by health insurance companies and offers the possibility of treating acutely mentally ill people in their familiar social environment, a demand that has been made since long by various parties. In this essay, four case vignettes will be used to critically review two years of ward-equivalent treatment .

Four case vignettes of different disorders are presented and discussed. The selection represents as broad a spectrum as possible of the disturbance patterns treated so far.

The ward-equivalent treatment represents a meaningful and long overdue expansion of the psychiatric treatment repertoire. It can be sensibly and successfully integrated into existing forms of treatment. This applies both to general psychiatric as well as addiction and geriatric psychiatric disorders. With ward-equivalent treatment affected persons are also reached who, for various reasons, have not sought or have not been able to seek contact with the psychiatric care system despite the need for inpatient treatment. However, the staff association needs further development of the regulations, e.g. with regard to the frequency of contacts, in order to take (even) better account of the living conditions of those affected.

The structure of the staff associations is resource-intensive. It can be designed both for specific incidents and for incidents that span several incidents. The advantage of a cross-disturbance orientation is that a larger number of affected persons can be treated. It also contributes more to being included in the "standard repertoire" of psychiatric treatment. The staff association must be developed further.