Monitoring human rights in mental health: the ITHACA toolkit.

Background/Objectives: The Institutional Treatment, Human Rights and Care Assessment (ITHACA) Toolkit has recently been developed by a consortium from across 15 EU countries, funded by the European Commission. The ITHACA Toolkit provides a clear and practical way to monitor human rights and general health care in mental health facilities.Methods: In developing the ITHACA Toolkit service users were consulted and employed at all stages. Over 100 service users’ participated in the focus groups which were conducted in each country. A key component of this consultation was to build service user capacity and involvement.Results: The toolkit was designed by services users, human rights experts, psychiatrists, psychologists and social scientists. It has been successfully field tested in 87 sites across 15 countries, covering a wide range of mental health care settings and can identify both human rights violations and examples of good practice in protecting, respecting and fulfilling the rights of persons with mental disabilities.Discussion/Conclusions: The ITHACA Toolkit is closely based upon the United Nation's Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). This lecture will present the development and the final version of the ITHACA Toolkit, which is now available in the following languages: Bulgarian, Czech, Dutch, English, Finnish, German, Greek, Italian, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Slovak, and Turkish. For full details of the ITHACA Toolkit, please go to our website at www.ithaca-study.eu.Funding: European Commission's Directorate General for Health and Consumer Policy (DG SANCO)