Clinical Audit In Mental Health

This book fully describes the purpose, methods, and implementation of clinical audit programs in mental health care in order to meet the demands of purchasers, providers, clinicians, carers and patients. It provides a practical guide to implementation in hospital and community settings. Applies well-established models for clinical audit to mental health care. Reflects current trends in quality assurance in health care. Provides detailed, specific advice on assessing the effectiveness of mental health treatment programs.

Audit is an essential activity for all psychiatrists. Involvement in audit must be evidenced by consultants for revalidation and by trainees in their Annual Review of Competence Progression (ARCP). This book will therefore be relevant for psychiatrists of all grades. It aims to help ease the audit process by offering tried and tested recipes for conducting audits in clinical services. All the audits in this book have been undertaken by the authors and it therefore provides useful practical advice for carrying out the audits in day-to-day practice.

At last, a book to take practitioners in the mental health field through the various steps involved in successful clinical audit. This book, including its team and individual exercises, is designed to help select topics for audit, to understand the methods most appropriate, to set standards, understand the significance of outcomes, and to bring about changes as a result. It is a practical guide to the analysis of health care, both for those working within a professional group, and for those in multidisciplinary teams. The book will be invaluable for all mental health professionals - psychiatrists, psychologists, nurses, occupational therapists, psychiatric social workers - and purchaser or provider managers interested in clinical audit and the measurement of quality more generally.

This volume, developed by the Observatory together with OECD, provides an overall conceptual framework for understanding and applying strategies aimed at improving quality of care. Crucially, it summarizes available evidence on different quality strategies and provides recommendations for their implementation. This book is intended to help policy-makers to understand concepts of quality and to support them to evaluate single strategies and combinations of strategies.

At last, a book to take practitioners in the mental health field through the various steps involved in successful clinical audit. This book, which includes individual and team exercises, is designed to help select topics for audit, to understand the most appropriate methods, to set standards, understand the significance of outcomes, and to bring about changes as a result. It is a practical guide to the analyses of health care, both for those working within a professional group, and for those in multidisciplinary teams. The book will be invaluable for all mental health professionals - psychiatrists, psychologists, nurses, occupational therapists, psychiatric social workers - and purchaser or provider managers interested in clinical audit and the measurement of quality more generally.

Clinical audit can be a powerful tool for change, but is often perceived as externally-imposed time-wasting. Focusing on applications of clinical audit in psychoanalytic psychotherapy NHS services, the authors examine why audit is resented, how it can be 'reconstructed' as a useful tool for clinicals, and provide real-life examples of good practice. More than a simple 'how-to', this book provides new rnderstanding of a persistent problem in health-care organisations and will be of interest to all mental health staff, trainees and service managers.