Achievements in mental health outcome measurement in Australia: Reflections on progress made by the Australian Mental Health Outcomes and Classification Network (AMHOCN).
BACKGROUND
Australia's National Mental Health Strategy has emphasised the quality, effectiveness and efficiency of services, and has promoted the collection of outcomes and casemix data as a means of monitoring these. All public sector mental health services across Australia now routinely report outcomes and casemix data. Since late-2003, the Australian Mental Health Outcomes and Classification Network (AMHOCN) has received, processed, analysed and reported on outcome data at a national level, and played a training and service development role. This paper documents the history of AMHOCN's activities and achievements, with a view to providing lessons for others embarking on similar exercises.


METHODS
We conducted a desktop review of relevant documents to summarise the history of AMHOCN.


RESULTS
AMHOCN has operated within a framework that has provided an overarching structure to guide its activities but has been flexible enough to allow it to respond to changing priorities. With no precedents to draw upon, it has undertaken activities in an iterative fashion with an element of 'trial and error'. It has taken a multi-pronged approach to ensuring that data are of high quality: developing innovative technical solutions; fostering 'information literacy'; maximising the clinical utility of data at a local level; and producing reports that are meaningful to a range of audiences.


CONCLUSIONS
AMHOCN's efforts have contributed to routine outcome measurement gaining a firm foothold in Australia's public sector mental health services.
School of Population Health, University of Queensland, Locked Bag 500, Sumner Park BC, Queensland, 4077, Brisbane, Australia. p.burgess@sph.uq.edu.au.
Philip
P
Burgess
Tim
T
Coombs
Adam
A
Clarke
Rosemary
R
Dickson
Jane
J
Pirkis