Quality, risk management and governance in mental health: an overview.

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: To consider the origin, current emphasis and relevance of the concepts of quality, risk management and clinical governance in mental health. CONCLUSIONS: Increasingly, health service boards and management teams are required to give attention to clinical governance rather than corporate governance alone. Clinical governance is a unifying quality concept that aims to produce a structure and systems to assure and improve the quality of clinical services by promoting an integrated and organization-wide approach towards continuous quality improvement. Many psychiatrists will find the reduction in clinical autonomy, the need to consider the welfare of the whole population as well as the..