Quality management in sociopsychiatric service: The use of routine data in efficiency control and care planning

Caring for psychiatric patients, Social Psychiatric Services (SpDi) carry out advising and therapeutic tasks and give medical opinions. They also participate in the management of the community psychiatric care system. The services differ widely in giving priorities to these tasks. In Germany there are no standards concerning quality and quantity of individual help being offered by SpDis. Evaluation of this individual client related help is essential for quality management. Besides rates, which partly describe the utilisation of the service, such parameters are of interest that hint at the psycho-social risk. Furthermore, figures indicating continuity or discontinuity of help are of importance. The statistics of the documentation in 1999 and 2000 of the SpDi Wolfsburg serve as an example for such an evaluation.