The goals and limitations of Israel's psychiatric case register

The Israeli Ministry of Health maintains a psychiatric case register that i ncludes basic demographic and clinical information for all psychiatric hosp ital admissions since 1950. Currently, the case register includes informati on about some 130,000 people who have been hospitalized. The case register is an important tool in many aspects of mental health care planning, such a s delineating problem populations, developing interventions, assessing the ramifications of policies, enacting programs for quality control, and condu cting research. In certain situations stipulated by law, some information i n the case register is shared with other authorities. Although the full pot ential of the psychiatric case register has not been exploited so far, crea tion of additional linkages with other databases and increased application of case register data in field studies could enhance its usefulness.