Quality management in psychiatry

Over the past 50 years, treatment possibilities in psychiatry have drastically improved, but the results we actually achieve under everyday treatment conditions fall far short of what could be accomplished. Quality management represents a suitable method of reducing this gap. Although it has been successfully practiced in other medical disciplines for a long time, its implementation in psychiatry has previously been restricted to pilot projects. Quality management programs in psychiatry have been slow to be accepted because, up to now, only a few mental health professionals have received training in quality management techniques. In order to compensate for this information deficit and to familiarize psychiatrists and other mental health care workers with this increasingly important topic, we will provide in this paper a brief survey of the most important principles and techniques of quality management. This information should encourage psychiatrists to apply this new method to their own areas of responsibility. The results of one of our own studies on schizophrenic outpatients, which are presented at the end of the paper, are intended to show that the outcome can be improved and costs reduced by implementing quality management programs in psychiatry.