Researchers: Lena Lipskaya-Velikovsky ¹, Anat Golos¹

Background: Psychiatric disorders impose a significant burden on individuals and society. Consistent use of tailored mental health services contributes to health and reduces disability. Despite changes in the mental health community clinic system following the 2015 reform, few studies have examined the characteristics, needs, and patterns of service usage, while comparing central Israel regions to periphery.

Objectives: (1) To characterize mental health clinic users in health measures and service satisfaction, as well as personal factors and characteristics of their personal and therapeutic environments in the center and periphery; (2) To examine the relationships between the study variables; and (3) To construct a multivariate model to explain health measures and service satisfaction.

Method: A comparative and correlational cross-sectional study was conducted using a convenience sample of 128 active mental health clinic users (mean age 42, SD=15.2, 48.4% men) from the center, adjacent periphery and distant periphery. Participants completed standardized tools assessing quality of life, symptom severity, service satisfaction, cognitive, emotional, and daily functions, environmental fit, therapeutic needs, extent of service, and barriers to service use. Additionally, they report on socio-demographic information and answer three open-ended questions.

Findings: The three regions differed in mental quality of life, satisfaction with the service, patterns of use, barriers, and scope of services, without a trend in favor of the center. Age, gender, locality type, executive functions, and barriers were found to be associated with outcome measures and contributed to their explanation to varying extents.

Conclusions: Clinic services vary across multiple factors; however, a central–peripheral location does not account for the observed differences.

Recommendations: There is a need to establish standards for the service quality evaluation in outpatient clinics and develop tailored services for men, young adults, and residents of rural areas.

Research end date: 03/2026