Abstract
Chinese government has long been urged to increase financial support for its mental health care (Liu et al., 2011). So, how actually can it be realized? Evidence on needs-driven directions of resource utilization has to be provided.
The Mental Health Policy and Service Development Projects in China were initiated to gather information on the perceived needs of the major stakeholders including patients, caretakers and mental health practitioners (World Health Organization, 2001). The variations in the policies among regions of China necessitate the development of regionally validated assessment tools for measuring the stakeholders’ perceived needs respectively. Despite a number of studies on the satisfaction of persons with schizophrenia toward mental health services, the root cause of low satisfaction which is the failure to fulfill the corresponding perceived needs (Hansson et al., 2003) has not been addressed.
In response to the urge to identify the perceived needs, the Perceived Rehabilitation Needs Questionnaire for People with Schizophrenia (PRNQ-S) has been developed and validated in Hong Kong (a city of China). As the societal and cultural values share within China, the Wuxi (its another city) version of the PRNQ-S (PRNQ-S-WX) has recently been validated based on its original Hong Kong version. PRNQ-S-WX has now become the only culturally validated measurement tool of rehabilitation needs in Wuxi and in the entire China. Future studies using this tool may compare the perceived needs between urban and rural areas in Wuxi, or identify the predictors of demographic variables on the importance level of the needs. The instrument can also be adopted upon minor adaptation for the similar purposes in other regions of China. The results would guide the government to precisely fine-tune the mental health policies and related services to strategically fulfill the needs. Such evidence would lay sharp justifications on the directions of resource utilization, and hence hopefully, an increment of the financial support.