Bridging the gap between current practice recommendations in national guidelines - a qualitative study of mental health services

Background “National guideline for assessment, treatment and social rehabilitation of persons with concurrent substance use disorders and mental disorders”, launched March 2012, is aimed at a wide range of health services. It holds a separate chapter on implementation. The National Centre for Dual Diagnosis was commissioned by the Norwegian Directorate of Health to develop a plan for implementation of the Guideline. It contains tools to strengthen management, clinicians and consumers. A clinical audit tool was made to measure research-practice-gap. The clinical audit is the start-point of the implementation-plan, followed by an action schema. The implementation-process is as follows: Identify today’s practice assessed against recommendations in the guideline, doing a clinical audit Identify areas of improvement based on the clinical audit