Healthcare interventions are concern of government policies, health service providers, civil society organizations and public. These interventions are mainly criticized with respect to their cost effectiveness. However, economic, social and health benefits of drug addiction rehabilitation services are not well understood and they remain relatively subsidized in comparison to other aspects of healthcare interventions. But, notwithstanding this, drug addiction rehabilitation services are generally financed with public funds in Turkey as like many other countries and this situation become subject to questioning when fiscal policies and cost effectiveness of these services are considered.
Based on this circumstances there is a great need for scientifically sound and practical financial and economic evaluation of substance abuse treatment services. In Turkey, recent legislative developments on substance abuse treatment services provide a baseline for structural evaluation of financial and economic feasibility of these services. In spite of ongoing methodological and empirical developments in economic evaluation of the primary health services, similar studies regarding addiction treatments are very rare in the literature. Correspondingly, methodological guidelines in this area are also very limited.
This study addresses these gaps by presenting a financial and economic evaluation of drug addiction rehabilitation services in Turkey considering urgent need of intervention in this area. Evaluation of these services is based on the basic requirements of a drug addiction rehabilitation center, which is determined by the related legislation in Turkey, and the evaluation was conducted according to the methodological principles presented by EMCDDA, European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addictions.
Measuring and Improving Cost, Cost-Effectiveness, and Cost-Benefit for Substance Abuse Treatment Programs: A Manual
