Quality standards for child and adolescent mental health in primary care

BMC Family Practice

Research Article

Mark Ashworth¹  Andre Tylee²  Myanthi Amarasinghe²  Sarah Robotham²  Emily Simonoff²  Caroline Coope²  Crispin Day²  Kapil Sayal³ 

[1] Department of Primary Care and Public Health Sciences, King’s College London School of Medicine, London, UK;King’s College London (Institute of Psychiatry), London, UK;Section of Developmental Psychiatry, University of Nottingham, NG7 2UH, Nottingham, UK;

关键词: Primary Care;    Mental Health Problem;    Quality Standard;    Quality Indicator;    Median Score;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2296-13-51

 received in 2012-01-27, accepted in 2012-06-06,  发布年份 2012

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundChild and adolescent mental health problems are common in primary healthcare settings. However, few parents of children with mental health problems express concerns about these problems during consultations. Based on parental views, we aimed to create quality of care measures for child and adolescent mental health in primary care and develop consensus about the importance of these quality standards within primary care.MethodsQuality Standards were developed using an iterative approach involving four phases: 1) 34 parents with concerns about their child’s emotional health or behaviour were recruited from a range of community settings including primary care practices to participate in focus group discussions, followed by validation groups or interviews. 2) Preliminary Quality Standards were generated that fully represented the parents’ experiences and were refined following feedback from an expert parent nominal group. 3) 55 experts, including parents and representatives from voluntary organisations, across five panels participated in a modified two-stage Delphi study to develop consensus on the importance of the Quality Standards. The panels comprised general practitioners, other community-based professionals, child and adolescent psychiatrists, other child and adolescent mental health professionals and public health and policy specialists. 4) The final set of Quality Standards was piloted with 52 parents in primary care.ResultsIn the Delphi process, all five panels agreed that 10 of 31 Quality Standards were important. Although four panels rated 25–27 statements as important, the general practitioner panel rated 12 as important. The final 10 Quality Standards reflected healthcare domains involving access, confidentiality for young people, practitioner knowledge, communication, continuity of care, and referral to other services. Parents in primary care agreed that all 10 statements were important.ConclusionsIt is feasible to develop a set of Quality Standards to assess mental healthcare provision for children and adolescents seen within primary healthcare services. Primary care practitioners should be aware of parental perspectives about quality of care as these may influence help-seeking behaviours.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© Sayal et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2012. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.