Auditing the quality of care of a crisis center

The purpose of this paper is twofold: First, it defines and describes different types of audits and areas of patient care which lend themselves to a quality of performance review. Second, it describes an audit application at a hospital-based crisis intervention center and the corrective action taken on the basis of the findings. The major emphasis of the audit was to determine the quality of medical-psychiatric consultation and to develop criteria for its initiation.