Consumer accreditation: developing a quality assurance patient evaluation scale.

The 1979 Consolidated Standards for Psychiatric Facilities of the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospitals are performance-oriented, with emphasis on the identification and resolution of problems interfering with treatment goals. Nearly 200 of these criteria can be rated directly by patients. Converted into questions, these items can provide the basis for simple, inexpensive, and effective measures of patient care flexible enough to meet the needs of individual agencies. When used in this way, the standards also provide a format by which a psychiatric program and the Joint Commission can focus collaboratively on quality assurance issues relevant to accreditation.