August 3, 2010

British National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence Briefing Paper on Quality and Outcomes Framework for Treatment of People With Serious Mental Disorders

On August 3, 2010, the British National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) released new proposed schizophrenia treatment quality-of-care guidelines to be included in the Quality Outcomes Framework (QOF) for 2011 and 2012. The NICE QOF indicators have been developed to improve patient care, and help reduce health inequalities by standardizing the services provided by general practitioners, who receive incentives for reaching the indicator benchmarks. NICE recommended that the proposed QOF indicators should be included with the National Health Service (NHS) negotiates the 2011/2012 indicators with the General Practitioners Committee to set the benchmark percentages and reward thresholds. The final QOF indicators will be published by NHS Employers in the winter of 2010.