The medical and social care of the individual psychiatrie patient in the Netherlands is in the hands of three kinds of psychiatrists: the clinical worker, the social psychiatrist and the psychiatrist with a private practice or working in an out-patient department.
This splitting-up of psychiatrie care is subject to many discussions, especially in the last decade. Several solutions of this problem are propagated.
This paper is an attempt to renew the discussions with a proposal to integrate the extra-mural care, now done by the social psychiatric service and in private practice, in the hand of only one psychiatrist. This must be possible, if this psychiatrist has at his permanent disposal a psychiatric social worker or a nurse, trained in social-psychiatrical work.
In this way the number of psychiatrists, taking care of the psychiatric individual in the different periods of his illness, can be reduced to two, of which one is working in the hospital and the other in close cooperation with a group of family doctors in the way of a home-team. This also can make an end to the puzzling multitude of contacts, necessary in the present-day situation.