OECD Work in Mental Health Care

A second focus for the HCQI Project in 2006 will be Mental Health Care. HCQI’s past work in this area has involved an extensive review of available measures of mental health care quality by an internationally renowned expert panel in mental health care.  Their findings were released in the OECD Health Technical Paper No. 17 Selecting Indicators for the quality of mental healthcare at the Health Systems Level in OECD Countries.  Using a structured review process, the expert panel set out to select indicators to cover four key areas of mental health: Continuity of Care, Coordination of Care, Treatment and Patient Outcomes. This report proposes 12 indicators as follows:

However the availability survey conducted in 2005 across participating countries shows that data which can be used to derive indicators with broad scientific consensus and available data for international Mental Health Care quality analyses are not available in most member countries. Therefore, the immediate activity for the Mental Health Care network is collecting information at a national level on the structural context of mental health care and relevant information systems available. The aim is two-folded: to address the gap in common concepts and definitions of mental health already detected across OECD countries and to map out a strategy for improving mental health care data systems within the OECD and getting mental health care data on the inter/national agenda. The approach chosen is an inductive one, building on actual situations in participating countries, rather than setting a purely theoretical framework.  Consensus around an initial revised set of indicators on Mental Health Care is also expected to be achieved in order to start data collection during the following year.

The first step of the incremental strategy chosen was the development of a survey to collect information on mental health information systems across eighteen OECD countries. The underlying notion was that while the development of specific mental health information systems might vary wildly across countries, there may be a wealth of data usable to assess mental health services disperse in different elements of the general health information system. This paper (Health Technical Paper #20) presents the results of the survey conducted in 2007.