Benchmarking a liaison psychiatry service: a prospective 6-month study of quality indicators

AIMS AND METHOD There are no national standards to evaluate the quality of delivery of inpatient liaison psychiatry services in general hospitals in the UK. In order to benchmark our service against best international practice, we adapted quality indicators from two peer-reviewed studies from Australia and Switzerland and monitored our performance standards over a period of 6 months. RESULTS There were145 patients assessed over the study period. We set a priori target of 90% achievement on indicators in the areas of timeliness of response to all referrals, timeliness of response to referrals following selfharm and quality of supervision of junior medical staff attaining 93.8, 87.5 and 89.6% respectively. CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS We demonstrated that we provided a reasonably responsive consultationliaison service with high levels of supervision of junior staff. National bodies should develop benchmarks in this area so that services can demonstrate the quality of their service and learn from others'good practice.