Mental Quality Assurance Quality Assurance in Mental

Mental Quality Assurance Quality Assurance in Mental Health Settings A major part of providing medical services to any population, including the provision of mental health services to rehabilitation patients, is assuring and maintaining a certain level of quality in the manner in which these services are provided and in the outcomes of medical decisions and actions.

This is important for professional as well as legal reasons; the professional implications of quality assurance are fairly direct and self-evident, while the legal necessity for quality assurance can be found in certain pieces of legislation and in service agreements with patients, communities, etc. The following paragraphs will describe a general framework of quality assurance in a low-security rehabilitative mental health institution as it relates to both professional standards and legal requirements.

Quality assurance includes an ongoing effort towards quality improvement, and there are a variety of practical and perceptual methods for establishing an ongoing commitment to quality. Staff recruitment and retention efforts are key to maintaining quality in any organization, and this can be especially true in mental health and other medical facilities (WHO 2003). Ensuring that all staff understand the quality expectations and improvement efforts is an important aspect of ongoing development in individual institutions and in the profession as a whole.

Specific roles within any mental health institution or unit should also be tasked with specific areas of quality assurance and improvement; administrators should not try to micromanage, yet need to have some overall awareness of quality assurance / and improvement efforts and successes (McMillen et al. 2008). As far as the legal requirements of quality assurance efforts, proper and effective delegation is again of great importance.

Maintaining very strict credentialing procedures in hiring and performing background checks as extensive as possible while remaining within the bounds of legal privacy restrictions is a legal requirement that can both create serious problems for the institution or unit if not properly followed, and that can greatly improve the quality of care and the legal position of the unit/institution in the event of alleged misconduct (Breakey 1996).

Similarly, regular case and performance review will help ensure that the quality of practice an of personnel is being maintained to all legal standards and beyond whenever possible, allowing for ever-greater levels of quality and ensuring full legal compliance with legislation and service agreements (Breakey 1996).

It must also be noted, however, that legal requirements and other external pressures are not enough to ensure a true ongoing commitment to quality assurance and improvement; the main impetus to achieve high quality standards must come internally, and the environment of the institution must be built around the concept of quality itself being paramount, rather than around the legal obligations for quality achievement that exist from.