Improving
Mental Health Care: Commitment to Quality edited by Barbara Dickey,
Ph.D., and Lloyd I. Sederer, M.D.
Soft
Cover, 341 pages
ISBN: 0880489634
American Psychiatric Association
January 2002 Price $69.00
How can professionals maintain or improve the quality of care
they provide when pressured by payers to reduce the cost of care?
As both a broad conceptual framework for considering the quality
of mental health care and as a practical field guide to real-life
techniques for measuring the quality of care, this volume will
prove exceptionally valuable for mental health care professionals,
administrators, and policymakers as well as for consumers and
consumer advocates, researchers, students, and public health
professionals.
Clinicians today face the challenge of providing optimal care in an
environment where costs drive clinical practice. But high quality,
not cost, remains the goal of professionals. By arming themselves
with measurable results, clinicians can improve the processes of
delivering mental health care and translate those improvements into
better outcomes for patients and their families.
In this timely
guide, the editors have gathered the work of 49 distinguished
contributors and crafted a valuable resource for overcoming the
extraordinary challenge of delivering high quality mental health
care. This groundbreaking book is divided into three sections:
The challenges today’s clinicians face in providing
optimal mental health care—Beginning with a review of the
report to then-President Clinton from the Advisory Commission on
Consumer Protection and Quality in the Health Care Industry,
subsequent chapters discuss professional ethics and managed
care, how Wall Street investors are changing the practice of
medicine, problems faced by managed care, and changes needed in
medical education to ensure that physicians are well prepared to
practice medicine in the 21st century.
Proven techniques for quality measurement— Measuring
quality of care presents significant conceptual and
methodological problems. These chapters review quality
measurement methods and describe support by the federal
government to improve these methods. Also addressed are how
consumers are joining the quality of care measurement movement
and how one large urban county mental health program is
advancing quality measurement.
Fourteen case reports of quality improvement projects—These
chapters detail principles and techniques that can be replicated
or tailored to fulfill the requirements of a variety of clinical
settings, ranging from the national health service in Great
Britain to a small geriatric unit in a large hospital. The work
showcased here was done by clinicians or administrators who,
concerned about the quality of care in their own settings, used
data to test for themselves whether their interventions resulted
in improved care.
Even if managed care disappeared, we would still need to question,
examine, and improve the quality of patient care—with clinicians
taking the lead, because only they can appreciate the subtle nuances
that maintain or improve quality standards, and only they can
make substantive changes in their clinical settings.
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