How to Use These Results
Consumers /Advocates
The quality measures found on the CEQM web site can help you
advocate for new policy and program initiatives, particularly where
the measures identify care gaps that cannot be addressed locally
without additional funding. They can be also be used as a checklist
to evaluate the mental health and addiction care you receive, and
can be used to evaluate your own efforts in recovery.
Clinicians
The measures will allow you to identify care gaps on the front
lines of primary health care. Where you have some ability to address
these gaps, the measures will allow you to prioritize your quality
improvement efforts. Where you feel you cannot directly influence
a care gap you can use these nationally agreed upon measures to
advocate for more resources/programs for your patients.
Decision Makers
CEQM’s Top 30 Measures have been achieved through a rigorous
evidence informed process based on national, regional and multi-stakeholder
consensus. Linkages with other leading primary health care projects
and research literature have also helped to inform these results.
The depth and scale of this approach gives you a “green light” on
policy action.
This small set of specific measures can be used as a focus for
primary mental health care reform. For example, funding agencies
devoting new resources to primary mental health care could use
the Top 30 measures as a checklist to screen project proposals
for access to funds.
Academics/Researchers
The Quality Measures Database on this website allows you to use
a wide range of search terms to explore 160 quality measures. The
Top 30 measures will assist you to prepare grant applications that
accurately reflect national priorities in primary mental health
care reform. For researchers that have a specific interest in a
topic or intervention considered in the CEQM surveys (e.g. chronic
disease management for depression), the regional ranking information
provided with CEQM measures will tell you which regions share your
interests.
CEQM QUALITY MEASURES CASE STUDY
A team of primary health care (PHC) providers including family
physicians, practice nurses and medical office assistants have
embarked on a collaborative project to improve the quality of care
for people with depression.
The PHC team already successfully uses the PHQ-9 scale to identify
people with depression and the intensity of symptoms experienced.
They now want to work on improving other aspects of ongoing depression
care, using existing resources in their local area.
However, these providers struggle with information overload:
they have to choose from many potential directions and hundreds
of recommendations from depression practice guidelines.
Having heard about the CEQM project and its web-based online
inventory of primary mental health care quality measures, the team
plans to search this database using a filter for “mood” related
measures and for “actionability” so that any measure
they identify will relate to a practice change that they may be
able to readily improve.
The PHC providers identify the CEQM measure “For individuals
being treated with antidepressants, establish and maintain follow-up
contact (office visits, phone calls, or other) at intervals tailored
to their mental health status”. They note that this measure
is also one of the Top 30 measures across Canada in terms of relevance,
actionability and overall importance for improvement in primary
mental health care.
The team then proceeds to capture data on this measure by making
it part of a depression care flow sheet – a tool developed
locally by clinicians and patients with depression, which is reviewed
at each visit after an antidepressant has been newly started.
At the start of their measurement process, the PHC team determines
that they are following up at appropriate intervals 35% of the
time. Over a one year period the rate of successful follow-up continues
to increase.
v10 Sep 27, 2006
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