Sunday, July 10, 2005

Explaining Outcomes Project, 1999-2005: Summary Report on Developing Instruments to Measure Critical Characteristics of Community Support Programs for People with a Severe Mental Illness (Canada) A report (in PDF format) from the Explaining Outcomes project of the Community Mental Health Evaluation Initiative. The executive summary notes that "In this report, we describe our experience in addressing the challenge of developing measures to assess critical characteristics of community mental health programs for people with a severe mental illness. "Critical characteristics" are those processes and contextual elements that define or give a "personality profile" to programs and which are predictive of consumer outcomes. The impetus for developing the project stemmed from two main premises: that the extensive shift, over recent years, to community-based care and the proliferation of community support programs and models have created a need for specialized program evaluation instruments; and, that current evaluation designs are unlikely to provide useful information to program planners and researchers about how programs effect positive consumer outcomes. " See also the page of related resources at the CMHEI site.  
  

Mental Health Court Support Services Policies and Procedures Report, in PDF format, from the Mental Health Court Support Consortium, a formal network of organizations which provide mental health court support services to the five courthouses within the City of Toronto - " This manual is composed of two parts. The first describes the policies and procedures which are common to all mental health court support services operating in courthouses across the City of Toronto. The second details the procedures which operate within individual court support services within specific courthouses in the city. Though specific procedures may vary from one courthouse to another to reflect the particularities in effect at each courthouse, the court-specific procedures are congruent with and indeed are superseded by the policies and procedures identified as common across mental health court support services in the city."