Quality assurance: An approach to accountability in a mental health center.

Although the potential benefits of quality systems are substantial, the development of effective systems is complicated by many difficulties. The present article describes a multidisciplinary quality assurance system that was developed in a comprehensive children's mental health center to cope with some of these difficulties. The system incorporates central elements of effective quality assurance activity: definition of standards, promotion of high-quality service, and evaluation of quality. It is proposed that some of the problems encountered in developing quality assurance systems can be minimized by taking into account principles of behavior modification, data from organizational research on worker participation and self-motivation, and established techniques of psychological assessment. (17 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)