Mental healthcare service networking solutions: a multi-layred network approach

When it comes to creating positive change, relevant mental healthcare services should call for better coordinated actions to create holistic plans of care and incorporate patients’ social and environmental contexts. The healthcare system has a multilevel nature because clinical, community, organisational, and policy levels are interdependent in promoting mental wellness and creating a well-connected support system. However, creating synergies towards healthcare integrated solutions among different set of players in healthcare is complex. Medical doctors, health, and lay health professionals, working in community health centres, pro-bono clinics, private foundations, hospitals, not-for-profit organisations, etc., have different needs, capabilities, and priorities that non necessarily converge when assisting their patients. All these actors create a complex web of multilevel relationships that, in turn, generate complex governance structures that regulate the health sector. What can facilitate partnerships among different mental health services to build an integrated care system for mental health? Which factors nurture trustworthy relationships and which network structures sustain systemic collaborations? These questions have been insufficiently examined because the analysis of multilevel collaborative processes (i.e., referrals, interventions, and campaigns, as well as resource sharing between public and private service providers, trust relationships among key personnels, patients and their families), has yet to be undertaken. Using past and current case studies, the present presentation discusses the theoretical and practical implications of applying a multilevel perspective, rooted in social networks research, for analysing the layered interpersonal patterns of relationships within and across different healthcare professionals and their networking performance, with a view to also map patient´s larger social system to understand how better support people´s mental health.