standards of care

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After years of experience in various mental healthcare settings--hospitals, community, managed care organizations, large group practices, and insurance sectors--the thing that continued to be a source of frustration was how the standard of care was decreased in order to balance the ledger. Sometimes this ledger called for seeing more clients than was ethically possible, and sometimes this ledger called for managing expectations of a person's recovery based on insurance parameters, rather than a provider's clinical judgement.  The multitude of ways in which this 'ledger' gets balanced is countless.

What is also true is that people do get better when they receive a high standard of care, and which, not-so-ironically, is often the very same care that practitioners are trained to provide, when receiving supervision from professionals and leading experts in the field.  With so many loopholes in insurance and other barriers to services, it can be hard to even know what these standards are anymore.

So how does someone know what standard of care to advocate for, let alone higher standards, if what is being provided has been reduced over and over again by the limitations of our healthcare system?

On the part of practitioners, it means providing transparency to what the standards of care are based on the parameters of their healthcare sector and setting.  Doing so provides support for clients and a platform from which to speak, because they now have a more full understanding of what these standards are, as well as more awareness of when their care deviates from these standards.  The other natural consequence of this practice is greater accountability and efficacy by providers to maintain and aspire to these standards.

In an effort to be the change we want to see, Eastside Insight has provided an overview of what these standards are in private practice world of mental healthcare, and what we are doing to meet these standards.