Abstract
BackgroundAustralia’s National Mental Health Strategy has emphasised the quality, effectiveness and efficiency of services, and has promoted the collection of outcomes and casemix data as a means of monitoring these. All public sector mental health services across Australia now routinely report outcomes and casemix data. Since late-2003, the Australian Mental Health Outcomes and Classification Network (AMHOCN) has received, processed, analysed and reported on outcome data at a national level, and played a training and service development role. This paper documents the history of AMHOCN’s activities and achievements, with a view to providing lessons for others embarking on similar exercises.MethodWe conducted a desktop review of relevant documents to summarise the history of AMHOCN.ResultsAMHOCN has operated within a framework that has provided an overarching structure to guide its activities but has been flexible enough to allow it to respond to changing priorities. With no precedents to draw upon, it has undertaken activities in an iterative fashion with an element of ‘trial and error’. It has taken a multi-pronged approach to ensuring that data are of high quality: developing innovative technical solutions; fostering ‘information literacy’; maximising the clinical utility of data at a local level; and producing reports that are meaningful to a range of audiences.ConclusionAMHOCN’s efforts have contributed to routine outcome measurement gaining a firm foothold in Australia’s public sector mental health services.
Highlights
Australia’s National Mental Health Strategy emphasises the importance of improving the quality and effectiveness of publicly-funded mental health services, promoting routine consumer outcome measurement as a vehicle to monitor such improvements [1,2,3,4,5]
AMHOCN has operated within a framework that has provided an overarching structure to guide its activities but has been flexible enough to allow it to respond to changing priorities
It has taken a multipronged approach to ensuring that data are of high quality: developing innovative technical solutions; fostering ‘information literacy’; maximising the clinical utility of data at a local level; and producing reports that are meaningful to a range of audiences
Summary
Australia’s National Mental Health Strategy emphasises the importance of improving the quality and effectiveness of publicly-funded mental health services, promoting routine consumer outcome measurement as a vehicle to monitor such improvements [1,2,3,4,5]. The Strategy stresses the need to examine service efficiency, advocating further development of casemix classifications to identify the resourcing required to care for ‘typical’ groups of consumers. Australia’s National Mental Health Strategy has emphasised the quality, effectiveness and efficiency of services, and has promoted the collection of outcomes and casemix data as a means of monitoring these. Since late-2003, the Australian Mental Health Outcomes and Classification Network (AMHOCN) has received, processed, analysed and reported on outcome data at a national level, and played a training and service development role. This paper documents the history of AMHOCN’s activities and achievements, with a view to providing lessons for others embarking on similar exercises
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