Addressing Complexity and Improving Access in Community Mental Health Services: An Inner-City Adaptation of Flexible ACT

To serve a wider range of patients with serious mental illness and develop more integrated, flexible services, investigators in Toronto redesigned a high-fidelity assertive community treatment (ACT) team according to flexible ACT (FACT) principles. FACT, developed in the Netherlands, merges ACT and intensive case management (ICM) services. This model holds the promise of an affordable approach to addressing unmet service needs in community mental health, particularly for patients with complex health issues, by widening the ACT admission criteria. This enables the team to serve more patients and provide both ACT and ICM services according to patients’ needs while allowing continuity of care.