Channelization of problem gamblers into treatment: Current structural barriers and future agenda

Psychiatric comorbidities are common among gambling disorder patients.

Despite the over-representation of problem gamblers in the mental health care system, the rate of treatment-seeking in Sweden stands at less than 10%.

Those few who seek help often meet a fragmented healthcare landscape where care responsibilities are shared across municipalities and regions with various levels of professional knowledge, types of intervention, and ambiguous routes to treatment.

In this proposal, we put forward a systematic and bibliometric literature review project to map out structural barriers in the healthcare system that may affect the route to treatment for problem gamblers in a Swedish context.

The proposed review will also incorporate the role of gambling operators in the fragmentation of, and potential future role in the route to treatment.The study will be conducted following a strict scientific process of systematic and bibliometric literature review.

In addition, we will conduct a grey literature review using an environmental scan of local gambling and mental health issue documents and publicly available registries.

We plan to employ a mixed research approach to perform data analysis using the quantitative bibliometric method and qualitative content analysis.

Finally, we will apply a novel way to synthesize our findings using Antecedent Decision Outcome (ADO) framework to identify and categorize barriers and set out a future agenda that could be used as a springboard to develop a coordinated, systemwide, and multisectoral approach to gambling-related mental health issue.

The proposed study has the potential to identify important knowledge gaps of immediate relevance to policy in a highly regulated area, and thus to public health.