Ensuring Quality in Psychological and Mental Health Services - Service User Quality Assessment EQUIP-SU - PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT There has been an increase in availability of evidence-based approaches for interventions and mental health service delivery in low-resource settings. In low- and middle-income countries this includes delivery of services by people who are not mental health specialists in primary care and community settings. However, there continues to be major gaps in delivery of evidence-based mental health services. In order to improve service delivery, we propose a quality assessment tool that can be completed by people with lived experience of mental health conditions who use services in primary care settings. When service users rate the quality of the care they receive, this feedback can be provided to health system managers and policy makers to aid in their decision making for improved mental health services. The quality assessment tool will be co-created by patients and their caregivers using health services (demand side in the healthcare system) and managers and policy makers (supply side in the healthcare system). Based on this co-creation process, service users will be able to complete assessments to rate quality indicators such as communication skills of service providers, the physical space for confidential clinical encounters, the availability of medication, referrals for psychological services, and use of patient education materials. The tool will differ from standard patient satisfaction tools that typically use subjective Likert scoring. Instead, the assessment tool will be based on a series of observations of provider behaviors, treatment and educational resources, and facility infrastructure. The quality assessment tool will be designed using the formatting of the World Health Organization Ensuring Quality in Psychological Support and Mental Health Helping Skill (EQUIP) platform, with the intention that the tool could eventually be made freely available on the platform alongside other care ratings resources. By completion of this research study, there will be an EQUIP quality assessment tool that can be completed by service users. The tool will have been piloted in two low-resource settings: Liberia and Nepal. There will also be adequate capacity building and other formative work completed to conduct a larger scale multi-site evaluation of quality improvement using this tool rated by health care service users.
