Mental health quality indicators: background and secondary definitions

2. Purpose of the Quality Indicator profile

The final QI profile provides information about quality outcomes for services for people with mental health problems, located within the context of Integrated Authority provision. Together, the QIs form a quality profile for services. They do not set new targets, and predominantly build on data that are already available.

Their purpose is to provide information that supports:

• development of mental health outcome measures related to effectiveness of interventions and service user experience
• monitoring of the delivery of actions in the Mental Health Strategy
• national tracking of service quality for people with mental health problems
• Health and Social Care Partnership and Health Board reporting and benchmarking of performance in relation to local mental health provision
• Improvement work by organisations

In addition, organisations can use the data to look more closely at individual teams, services and specialties. Opportunities will exist for specialist mental health services to individually analyse the QIs for their populations, e.g. by gender, sexuality, deprivation; for child and adolescent, general adult, older people, learning disabilities and autism, forensic, substance misuse, perinatal; and for different service types e.g. psychological therapies.

This approach is in line with the direction set in Sir Harry Burns’ Review of Targets and Indicators for Health and Social Care in Scotland ^[2] , which emphasised the value of data for quality improvement.