Achievements in mental health outcome measurement in Australia: Reflections on progress made by the Australian Mental Health Outcomes and Classification Network (AMHOCN)
Open accessAbstract
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. METHOD: 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. CONCLUSION: AMHOCN's efforts have contributed to routine outcome measurement gaining a firm foothold in Australia's public sector mental health services.
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Implementing the Australian initiative on a large scale required considerable investment in mental health providers, ongoing training, and a broad engagement program.
“To be able to implement this initiative on such a large scale required considerable investment in mental health providers, ongoing training and a broad program of engagement 79 .”
From Measuring and improving the quality of mental health care: a global perspective (2018) · cites this paper as [79]
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- Authors
- Burgess, P., Coombs, T., Clarke, A., Dickson, R., & Pirkis, J.
- Affiliations
- The University of Queensland (AU)
- New South Wales Institute of Psychiatry (AU)
- The University of Melbourne (AU)
- Corresponding author
- Burgess, Philip
- Venue
- International Journal of Mental Health Systems
- Published
- 2012
- Volume
- 6
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 4
- ISSN
- 1752-4458 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC3459810
- OpenAlex
- W2101423139
- Cited by
- 36
- References
- 29
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 2 · 2023: 1 · 2022: 3 · 2021: 4 · 2020: 3 · 2019: 3 · 2018: 2 · 2017: 5 · 2016: 4 · 2015: 3 · 2014: 3 · 2013: 2
- FWCI
- 2.91
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- cc-by
- Locations
- International Journal of Mental Health Systems (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Minerva Access (University of Melbourne) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Psychiatric care and mental health services
- Health Sciences › Health Professions › Health Information Management › Healthcare Quality and Management
- Health Sciences › Health Professions › General Health Professions › Mental Health and Patient Involvement
- Keywords
- routine outcome measurement, public mental health services, National Mental Health Strategy, data quality, information literacy
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