Quality standards for community mental health teams

There is an increasing requirement for mental health services to demonstrate the quality of care provided. We have developed a quality report of our local community mental health team in Cornwall and suggest quality measures that we believe are useful to patients and clinicians, and possible to implement without overwhelming busy team members. They include measures of satisfaction, accessibility, safe process and review, outcomes, evidence-based practice and staff performance. Different teams may need different standards but we hope this paper will stimulate discussion and debate.