Establishing outcome measures for shared care in the treatment of depression.

Collaborative care between general practitioners and mental health specialists has been shown to improve the care of patients with depression in primary care and may be an important development in mental health services. Outcome measures are becoming increasingly important in psychiatry as we attempt to alter and improve the structure of services. In this article we propose a series of outcome measures that can be used to measure the effectiveness of shared care for patients with depression including objective measures of improvement in psychopathology and subjective measures of patient and professional experience.