Meeting the challenges in the delivery of child and adolescent mental health services in the next millennium: The continuous quality improvement approach

Managed care and concerns about the effectiveness of services are major pre ssures on mental health services. An approach to dealing with the challenge s of providing high-quality, cost-effective services is continuous quality improvement or CQI. This article describes four major themes that motivate the CQI approach. However, we also describe the major obstacles in using an approach originally designed for manufacturing for human services. The nee d to accurately measure both treatment processes and outcomes is emphasized .