NHS Tayside has approved a five-year strategy aimed at improving mental health services across the region.
The plan will mean fewer beds for people requiring admission to hospital and more help delivered closer to their homes.
NHS Tayside spends £58 million a year on mental health services but cannot demonstrate how effective the services are.
Members of the board of NHS Tayside, meeting in King’s Cross Hospital, Dundee, were told the data was “wanting”.
Professor Kevin Power, NHS Tayside’s head of psychological therapies, said, “We need to know more about our customers.”
He said there was no consistent monitoring of which treatments worked best or how many sessions might be required to reach a certain stage of improvement.
Prof Power said that some information was collected but he wants to develop systems that will be able to measure outcomes consistently across a number of different mental health services, starting with psychological therapies.
“There is data there but it is not collected in any consistent way that allows us to identify areas of good and bad clinical practice,” said Prof Power.
As an example, he said data was gathered on the numbers of patients who do not attend for their scheduled appointments but not on why they failed to attend.
“Are they opting out of treatment because treatment is ineffective?” he asked. “We want to know how effective or ineffective the interventions we offer our customers are.”
Dr Brian Timney, NHS Tayside’s associate medical director for mental health, said 25% of the general population will have a mental disorder at some time.
“Demand for our services is increasing, referrals are increasing and we need to be able to respond to these demands and increase the capacity we have to meet these challenges and we have no option but to change and reform our services.”
He described the five-year strategy as a plan for significant change.
“We believe these changes are necessary to meet the needs of our population and to make the best use of our resources.”
Non-executive John Angus said the strategy was the first mental health report he had read in the last seven years that did not ask for an extra million pounds for services, but was in fact making savings.
Non-executive Betty Ward said she believed mental health services would be “more professional, more consistent and more caring” through the implementation of the plans but she thought talk of savings gave a very negative message.
“It’s as if we are doing things to save money,” she said. “We are not. We are doing things to change how we spend money.”