Background: Community health efforts often include outreach activities designed to increase awareness and ensure uptake of services or programs. Yet, few comprehensive outreach evaluations exist, particularly those designed to improve access to and use of mental health services. Purpose: This article summarizes the use of two established…

Consumer satisfaction with mental health services is one of the process objectives inherent in the general goals for community mental health centers funded federally by the National Institute of Mental Health. Programs must demonstrate that patients and other service consumers agree that their needs are being met by existing services and patterns…

Advantages and disadvantages to various methods of assuring quality and accountability in community mental health centers are discussed. Examples are external structure review, peer monitoring, and site visitation. (LAB)

Examines strengths and weaknesses of several needs assessment techniques currently in use and concludes that exclusive use of any single technique will likely provide a biased or inaccurate assessment of community mental health needs. There is a critical need to empirically investigate the reliability and validity of these needs assessment…

A method is described for increasing residual degrees of freedom in a community experiment without substantially increasing cost or difficulty by dividing experimental subunits into batches. Theoretical advantages of batch sampling are described and illustrated with data from the Pawtucket Heart Health Program. (SLD)

Articles in this special issue consider different aspects of community-level evaluation research and demonstrate the emerging sophistication and promise of this field. Process evaluation, qualitative research, and meta-analysis are promising new directions for ensuring more appropriate levels of analysis and more appropriate outcomes. (SLD)

The paper presents the conceptual framework and research strategy of the psychiatric utilization review and evaluation (PURE) project at the Connecticut Mental Health Center. Review by structure, by outcome and by process are considered briefly. The Basic Utilization Review Program was developed to provide a more sophisticated and economical…

A methodology is presented for collection of cost data in evaluation of community-level health interventions that coincides with the intervention implementation. The seven discrete steps of the analysis are described, and the Minimal Contact Education for Cholesterol Change study is used as an example of how the strategy is used. (SLD)

Proposes a framework for assessing how human service delivery systems function. Identifies factors that influence the ability of agencies to operate as a unified system. Provides an accurate picture of how services are delivered to target populations, and why various systems function as they do. (Author/JAC)

Two evaluation procedures were evaluated in terms of their impact upon client attrition in a community mental health center. The behavioral analysis report, an innovative evaluation procedure, led to more treatment contacts than a traditional evaluation method. Possible effective elements within the behavioral analysis report are discussed.…

The theme of this serial issue is helping individuals involved in community health programs at the local level to devise and apply a protocol for the evaluation of a community health program. In the opening sections of the issue evaluation is defined, the difference between a direct quantifying measure and an indicator is clarified, obstacles to…

Outcomes are reported for youths with serious emotional disturbance receiving customary services from community mental health service providers who receive state mental health funds. Various outcome indicators for the Child and Adolescent Functional Assessment Scale (CAFAS) are described, as well as a procedure for categorizing youths into client…