Quality improvement in depression care in the Netherlands: the Depression Breakthrough Collaborative. A quality improvement report

Abstract

Background: Improving the healthcare for patients with depression is a priority health policy across the world. Roughly, two major problems can be identified in daily practice: (1) the content of care is often not completely consistent with recommendations in guidelines and (2) the organization of care is not always integrated and delivered by multidisciplinary teams.

Relations between mental health team characteristics and work role performance

“…To the best of our knowledge, however, the effect of evidence-based practices (such as clinical approaches) on work role performance, or those of standardized procedures and evaluation tools, have never been assessed, despite the awareness that these variables improve quality of care for users with mental health and substance use disorders [10, 11]. Moreover, the influence of user characteristics on work role performance among teams has not been examined.…”

PsyScan e-tool to support diagnosis and management of psychological problems in general practice: a randomised controlled trial

“…Several internet-based tools already exist and have been described and evaluated; these showed increased effectiveness and efficacy for achieving reliable diagnostic results, positive effects on recognition and diagnosis, higher response and remission rates, less polypharmacy, fewer medication side effects, greater satisfaction with treatment, and higher quality of life (QOL). [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27] However, the authors felt that some essential components were missing in the available tools, including:…”

Towards integrated primary health care for depressive disorder in the Netherlands. The depression initiative

“…improving diagnosis of depression in primary care, or improving monitoring of chronic depression. The Trimbos Institute facilitates the teams in attaining this implementation according to the multidisciplinary guideline for depression as described elsewhere in this Journal [9]. In total 101 health professionals participated in the depression breakthrough collaborative teams, and 536 patients were diagnosed with depressive disorder.…”

“…Both efforts to implement integrated care, as described in the two articles recently published in this Journal [9, 11], face similar factors that can facilitate implementation of integrated care. Both projects seek a link between professionals and patients in the primary care setting, which underscores that primary care is of paramount importance for attaining integrated care for depressive disorders.…”

“…Furthermore, the use of a web based algorithm to support health care professionals in performing their task according to principles of integrated care is widely accepted in the collaborative care project and seems to be an effective way to overcome the fuzzy structure of the primary care setting. As such, it may be a way to provide the structural support that has been found to be needed in the more severely depressed groups, as assessed in the depression breakthrough collaborative project [9]. …”