Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Insight – Mental Health Needs Assessment – Chapter Five: Working-age adults – System enablers – Learning health system

Outcomes

In broad terms, ‘outcomes’ refers to the results of any care or treatment provided. In mental health, the outcomes of support, care and treatment might be that a person is able to lead a more fulfilling life, have reduced or no symptoms, volunteer in the community or return to a job that they love.
There are a range of frameworks and tools to measure mental health and wellbeing, including those that measure symptoms of mental illness, quality of life, and functioning (The King’s Fund, 2019).
The NHS Long Term Plan (NHS, 2019) commits to improving the quality of care and outcomes for patients, and the use of patient reported outcome measures (PROMs) in community mental health services (Royal College of Psychiatrists, 2023).
Service users and staff highlight that there any many challenges in using standardised health outcomes in mental health services (The King’s Fund, 2019). For example, individuals have different ways of conceptualising their mental health (ranging from biological causes of illness to social factors), which are not always captured in measurement tools (The King’s Fund, 2019). Patient reported outcome measures can help to measure the effectiveness of care, support patients to feel understood and progress towards their personal goals, and to help services understand if they are meeting patients’ needs (Royal College of Psychiatrists, 2023).
Different services use different types of outcomes:
- Three PROMS have been selected by NHS England for use in NHS commissioned community MH Services: DIALOG scale, Goal-Based Outcomes tool (GBO) and the Recovery Quality of Life 10-item scale (ReQoL-10).
- MYCaW, an individualised tool for understanding people’s concerns, often used within Personalised Care roles.
- The Centre for Mental Health has carried out research into how local authorities can understand how well mental health services meet people’s needs, starting with ‘what good mental health care feels like’ (Centre for Mental Health, 2022).

References

Full list of references is included at the end of this chapter.