Mental health providers should adopt quality improvement to improve patient care, a new King’s Fund publication, The Quality improvement in mental health report, argues.
The independent charity said: “Quality improvement – the continual change of services through testing, measuring, reviewing, and refining – is becoming increasingly common in NHS organisations. But the report finds that while mental health providers are increasingly adopting this approach in individual teams or services, more need to do this across their organisations.”
The report finds that ‘quality improvement can affect both quality and efficiency of care’, reducing stay lengths, waiting times, bed numbers, and bed occupancy. It can also reduce staff absence, violent incidents involving staff, and first appointment non-attendance. The King’s Fund says that if quality improvement is ‘undertaken systematically by engaged frontline teams’, it can lead to ‘sustained improvements shared across the organisation’. The report notes that mental health providers ‘have a long history of involving users in service design, making them especially well-placed to using quality improvement to support innovation’.
Shilpa Ross, one of the authors, said: “Some mental health providers have reported impressive improvements in patient care by making quality improvement a part of the way the organisation does things. It has the added benefit of improving the organisational culture, something many providers struggle to do, and that has a positive impact on both employees and the experience of people being cared for.”