Quality, bias and service user experience in healthcare: 10 years of mental health guidelines at the UK National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health

Abstract

The guideline programme developed by the National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health (NCCMH) for the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) is probably the most comprehensive and methodologically advanced mental health guideline programme in the world, covering most adults and children with mental health problems and addressing a broad range of pharmacological and psychological/psychosocial interventions. As the success of the NICE programme gains momentum, its influence in the National Health Service (NHS) grows. If guidelines contain systematic bias the effects will be widespread. Over the last 10 years the NCCMH has recognized imperfections and patterns of bias in the way that evidence is generated and included in guidelines, including psychological/psychosocial interventions and drug treatments. The pharmaceutical industry remains a major source of bias through selective reporting and publishing, and represents a threat to ensuring the evidence underpinning guidelines and clinical decision-making is as complete and reliable as possible.

The inclusion of service users into guideline development at the NCCMH has developed in parallel to the identification and understanding of evidential bias, and is now becoming an important focus for high-quality guidelines which are becoming increasingly person-centred. For mental health this is as radical as the integration of psychological/psychosocial treatments into what has, for many years, been a largely medical domain. The future role of service users in monitoring their own experience of care and ensuring that trusts are accountable to them is now a real possibility and is likely to have an impact upon the traditional power relations in mental health and the stigma usually associated with psychiatric problems.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.

Note

[1] For a recent framework by the Picker Institute see http://www.pickereurope.org/patientcentred.