Describing and comparing quality in psychiatric care across the globe with the QPC-Instrument

Abstract

IntroductionThere is a lack of cross-cultural comparison of patients and staff perceptions of quality of care in the psychiatric care. One reason is the absence of standardized instruments.ObjectivesThe international research programme “Quality in Psychiatric Care” aims at adapting the instrument QPC versions for patients and staff to different international settings.AimsThe aims are to test the psychometric properties and equivalence of dimensionality of the different language versions of QPC and also to describe and compare the quality of inpatient, outpatient and forensic in-patient psychiatric care across different countries.MethodsThe QPC is a family of self-reported instruments from the patients’ perspective. In this programme, we used different languages versions in three areas for patient and staff; inpatient (QPC-IP/IPS), outpatient (QPC-OP/OPS) and forensic inpatient care (QPC-FIP/FIPS).ResultsThe Danish versions for QPC-FIP and QPC-FIPS show that the confirmatory factor analysis revealed that the factor structure was equivalent to the original Swedish version. Patients rated the quality of care generally lower than staff and lowest in the participation dimension. The Indonesian version of QPC-IP is under analysis. The first result show that patients rated the quality of care lower than Swedish inpatients and lowest in the discharge dimension. Several studies in Indonesia are still ongoing as well as in Brazil and Spain.ConclusionsThere are few standardized instruments for measuring quality of care in the psychiatric care. Therefore, QPC is expected to makes an important contribution to the development in this field.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.