Towards routine user assessment of mental health service quality performance

The need to incorporate mental health service users in routine measurement of service effectiveness is included among recent policy proposals. However, mental health services pose particular problems of measurement and may prevent the acceptance of measures that are both comparable and meaningful. This paper outlines some of the major difficulties to be faced in routinely measuring quality of mental health services and taking users’ views into account. It then proposes a minimum specification for any measure of quality that places mental health service users at the centre of the process.