Mental Health Outcome Measures

Mental Health Outcome Measures provides an authoritative review of measurement scales currently available to assess the outcomes of mental health service intervention. The excerpt of summaries by leading writers in the field assess the contributions of scale in areas including mental state examination, quality of life, patient satisfaction, needs assessments, measurement of service cost, global functioning scales, and social disability. These chapters provide a critical appraisal of how far such scales have been shown to be reliable and valid, and provide valuable insights in to their ease of use. This book will provide an invaluable reference manual for those who want to take research on mental health services, and for those who need to interpret this research for policy, planning, and clinical practice.

In order to operate in an evidence-based fashion, mental health services rely on accurate, relevant, and systematic information. One important type of information is the nature of the problems experienced by recipients of mental health care, and how these problems change over the course of time. Outcome measurement involves the systematic, repeated assessment of aspects of health and illness, either by service providers, service recipients, or both. From outcome measurement clinicians and service recipients achieve a common language whereby they can plan treatment and track progress, team leaders and managers secure a basis to compare their services with others and to promote quality, while policy makers and funders derive evidence of effectiveness. This book will be an essential and practical resource for all members of the mental health clinical team as well as those responsible for establishing or managing services, and directing policy.

Patient-reported outcomes (PROs) are measures of how patients feel or what they are able to do in the context of their health status; PROs are reports, usually on questionnaires, about a patient's health conditions, health behaviors, or experiences with health care that individuals report directly, without modification of responses by clinicians or others; thus, they directly reflect the voice of the patient. PROs cover domains such as physical health, mental and emotional health, functioning, symptoms and symptom burden, and health behaviors. They are relevant for many activities: helping patients and their clinicians make informed decisions about health care, monitoring the progress of care, setting policies for coverage and reimbursement of health services, improving the quality of health care services, and tracking or reporting on the performance of health care delivery organizations. We address the major methodological issues related to choosing, administering, and using PROs for these purposes, particularly in clinical practice settings. We include a framework for best practices in selecting PROs, focusing on choosing appropriate methods and modes for administering PRO measures to accommodate patients with diverse linguistic, cultural, educational, and functional skills, understanding measures developed through both classic and modern test theory, and addressing complex issues relating to scoring and analyzing PRO data.

This remarkable volume offers a critical analysis of outcome assessment in psychiatry, which allows us to assess not only the measurable domains (i.e., symptoms, functioning, quality of life, and perception of care), but also the standards and instruments used to judge the quality of care.

How do we know if mental health services work? What are the best ways to measure the outcomes of care for people with mental health problems? This book contains five practical scales for assessing the outcomes of mental healthcare. They are the European versions of: Camberwell Assessment of Need (for unmet and met needs) Client Socio-demographic and Service Receipt Inventory (for service costs) Involvement Evaluation Questionnaire (for impact of care on family members) Lancashire Quality of Life Profile (for quality of life) Verona Service Satisfaction Scale (for service satisfaction). Each scale has been standardised (in Danish, Dutch, English, Italian and Spanish), and has been shown to be reliable and valid in all these European languages. The book contains full details of the development of these scales, manuals for their use, the scales themselves and instructions on how to use the results. These new measures will be invaluable to all those in research, evaluation, audit and management who have an interest in evidence-based policy and practice in mental healthcare.