What is important in psychiatric outpatient care?
The development of quality assurance programmes for psychiatric care has increased the interest in quality of care and accountability from the patient’s perspective. The aims of this study were threefold. First, to map descriptive characteristics of ideal outpatient psychiatric care through open-ended patient interviews, using a sample of 94 psychiatric outpatients, second, to have another sample of 84 outpatients rank the importance of 57 treatment characteristics extracted from the qualitative analysis of the interviews, and third to make comparisons with a previously performed investigation on quality of care of psychiatric inpatients. Results of the content analysis showed that characteristics of ideal outpatient treatment could be classified in eight content categories: accessibility of care, treatment content, staff-patient relationship, continuity of care, staff’s professionalism, patient information/co-influence, treatment environment and cost of care. Results from the patients
