Development of the International Classification of Mental Health Care (ICMHC)

Evaluations of the process of providing mental health care have been hampered because a tool to systematically describe the interventions actually provided by the services was lacking. In this paper the development of such a tool (the International Classification of Mental Health Care; ICMHC) is described.

Subsequent versions of the ICMHC were developed, using comments from experts in 24 WHO field centres and results from a number of field trials. In the final version 10 Modalities of Care can be used to describe Modules of Care, using the Level of Specialization scale. The inter-rater reliability of this version was evaluated by the Italian research team, using data from 43 services.

Reliability ranged from excellent for nine modalities to reasonably good for the remaining modality.

In the context of evaluation studies, the ICMHC can be used to describe systematically mental health care interventions.