Successful ACT Programs Set Standards and Stick to Them

Assertive community treatment (ACT) is a way to get and keep people with severe mental illness engaged in care in public mental health systems. Yet too little is known about how to get such programs started and keep them operating well.

It turns out that program leaders must juggle several approaches simultaneously to make that happen, wrote Maria Monroe-DeVita, Ph.D., an acting assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Washington School of Medicine, and colleagues, in the August Psychiatric Services. They must set clear practice standards and maintain adequate funding, train and supervise staff, integrate staff members into a good working team, and measure services delivered and collect patient outcome data. This multipronged approach can help maintain program quality even as health services researchers expand their understanding of what keeps an effective ACT program functioning.

To read more about research into what makes for a successful ACT program, see Psychiatric News here.

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