An abundant literature has been published about mental services evaluation and was used for purpose of comparisons between services.Comparisons have mainly concerned care in the traditional psychiatric hospital based mode versus community mental health (Tansella et al., 1982; Kraudy et al., 1987; Kovess et al., 1995) or care in different areas or countries (Sytema et al., 1989).Those comparisons have to rely on crude description of services (Tansella et al., 1986) like psychiatric hospitalisation, day hospitalisation or out patient intervention. Intensive international collaboration underpinned the importance of a more precise description about services which could have extremely different components under the same label.In fact services in mental health are complex to describe to allow meaningful comparisons because they cover many different actions given by a variety of providers and grouped into various structures as:
•hospitals: specialised or general, large or small;•day hospitals and centre;•out patients clinics, crisis centres.Care could also be provided by independent workers from the diverse medical and non medical professions involved in the mental health fields in private practice settings.