Borgès Da Silva, Georges <br/><br/>
Healthcare Quality in the Psychiatric Hospital: A Literature Review and Perspectives 

 -  2003.<br/>							 
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<br/><br/> Within hospitals, a plan for quality improvement consists of numerous steps to be taken by an inclusive management team, implicating all of the actors involved. The establishment of an instrument panel of indicators is the outcome of such a participatory process. The existence of best practice referentials allows for the construction of a coherent plan to improve the quality of care. A query of the francophone bibliographic databases reveals very few publications from internal audits on the relevance of care. Nevertheless, external audits demonstrate the significance of evaluation of the quality of care in psychiatric hospitals. The authors are therefore surprised to note the existing hiatus between the wealth of references and their lack of being used in the publications of the professionals concerned. The analysis of the relevance of the medical decision is not widely accepted. Clinical practice is still considered as an art form even though it has become a technique which now calls on the collective experience of peers.