Continuous quality improvement: conceptual foundations and application to mental health care.

Continuous quality improvement (CQI), a philosophy and a set of techniques for managing the quality of services in health care, involves procedures for defining an organization's goals and work processes and applying quantitative measures of quality focused on patient outcome. To successfully adapt CQI to specific mental health care settings, staff must understand the attitude, approach, and processes that distinguish CQI and must address the challenges of defining quality within mental health care and coordinating the efforts of multidisciplinary treatment teams. After detailing the development of the conceptual underpinnings of CQI, the author uses an example of implementation of CQI on a unit for chronic mentally ill patients at a state psychiatric hospital to show how these challenges can be addressed by reconceptualizing and specifying the treatment mission.