As part of her final year research project in the Graduate Entry Medical School, University of Limerick, Dr Carla Henderson queried the literature about the methods of development and content of key performance indicators for MESUDS – the mental and substance use disorders – as she named them.
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| Figure 1. Journal cover |
Her searches revealed a great variety in the methodologies of indicator development for MESUDS – including expert opinion, literature review, stakeholder consultation, and the structured consensus method.
The paper in Mental Health and Substance use journal (see Figure 1) highlighted several problems in the performance indicators: (1) A bias in the level of performance assessment toward system/health plan evaluation followed by program/service evaluation; (2) Similarly, there was a large skew toward indicators that reflected evaluation of processes. Especially in the addiction health services research, we don’t know whether improvement of care processes is linked to improvement of patients’ health: “such changes have thus far demonstrated only minimal impact on patient outcomes” (Humphreys et al, 2011, see Figure 2).
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| Figure 2. Dr Keith Humphreys |
Read the full paper at the journal’s website: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17523281.2014.901402#.U0LiuvldWg4
Cited works:
- Carla Henderson, Jan Klimas, Colum Dunne, Des Leddin, David Meagher, Thomas O’Toole, Walter Cullen (2014). Key performance indicators for mental health and substance use disorders: a literature review and discussion paper. Mental Health and Substance Use, Early Online.
- Keith Humphreys, A. Thomas McLellan (2011). A policy-oriented review of strategies for improving the outcomes of services for substance use disorder patients. Addiction, Volume 106, Issue 12, pages 2058–2066