The sharp increase in health costs requires increased attentiveness on the part of clinics and the Department of Health. Despite growing cost pressures, the quality of treatments must remain high. Transparency is a requirement, if the correct decisions are to be made in this environment. Greater transparency should be achieved by means of cross-institution quality comparisons in psychiatry. To this purpose, the psychiatric clinics in the Canton of Zurich have been collecting quality data in the framework of the canton’s psychiatry statistics (Psychiatriepatientenrecord = PSYREC). For all public clinics and clinics eligible for state funding, the recording of this data is compulsory.

The Department of Health of the Canton of Zurich commissioned an analysis of the data from six psychiatric clinics with regard to plausibility of the data collected up to now. Further, the potential of the quality instruments used was assessed by calculating response rates and effect sizes.

An additional aspect of this project was to work out and propose a practicable and at the same time useful quality monitoring system. It was supposed to capture the specific issues of interest to the Department of Health in connection with mental health services and document them annually per clinic.