Quality Improvement Info

Quality healthcare can be described as striving for and reaching excellent standards of care.  In mental health care, quality is a measure of whether services increase the likelihood of your desired treatment outcomes and are consistent with current evidence-based practices.

For people living with mental illness, and their families, quality emphasizes that services should produce positive outcomes.  For practitioners, service providers, and policy makers, it emphasizes the best use of current knowledge and technology.

Improved quality means that mental health services should:

• Preserve the dignity of people with mental disorders,
• Provide accepted and relevant clinical and non-clinical care aimed at reducing the impact of the disorder and improving the quality of life of people with mental disorders,
• Use interventions which help people with mental disorders to cope by themselves with their mental health disabilities,
• Make more efficient and effective use of scarce mental health resources, and
• ensure that quality of care is improved in all areas, including mental health promotion, prevention, treatment and rehabilitation in primary health care, outpatient, inpatient and community residential facilities.