ASSESSMENTS OF COMMUNITY MENTAL-HEALTH SUPPORT SYSTEMS - A KEY INFORMANT APPROACH

This article describes the development of a 'key informant survey' to assess the performance of local systems of care for persons with a chr onic mental illness. The measure yields ratings of: (1) the extent to which clients experience service delivery problems in 11 community sup port system elements, (2) overall performance of the community support system, and (3) the performance of local mental health authorities. F ollowing pre-testing, the survey was administered to 699 respondents i n nine U.S. cities. Internal consistency coefficients were found to be within acceptable ranges for all of the scales across all nine cities . Analyses comparing mean values for performance ratings showed that t he nine sites could be arranged into three groups representing high, m edium and low system performance. These findings support observations from site visits conducted over several years and suggest that the sur vey is a valid instrument for assessing local systems of care.