[Day care clinics central and/or distributed. A standard element of child and adolescent psychiatric care]

Day-care clinics as specialized care units of child and adolescent psychiatric care in Austria represent an important component for person-orientated treatment offers. In addition to numerous advantages, they also put higher demands on the young patients and their relatives.

The Austrian structure for day-care settings is recorded in the Austrian structure plan for health. Therefore, particular attention is paid to structural quality criteria, which are based on the Austrian concept of performance-oriented hospital financing.

A high demand and need for readiness for transdisciplinary, multimodal treatment concepts and forms is discussed. It becomes ovious that there is a need for large spatial resource requirements. The establishment of several day clinic groups at one location and spatial requirements cannot be found in the concept of performance-oriented hospital financing.

To ensure and evaluate the quality of treatment, recommendations are made on a patient-related and team- or organization-related level. The workgroup "day-care-clinic" of the Austrian Society for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychosomatics and Psychotherapy recommends a treatment structure characterized by transdisciplinarity and participation. Further, it regionalized and local access and the integration of the day clinic into the community is necessary. Networking with other care structures and using social-psychiatric networks is essential. Regional characteristics should be taken into account and specialized, topic-specific day clinic groups should be increasingly included in further planning and concepts.