Building Consumers in to Service Evaluation: Development of the MH-CoPES Framework in New South Wales

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this paper is to present the Mental Health Consumer Perceptions and Experiences of Services (MH-CoPES) Framework and discuss its development. The Framework was developed to address the need for a consistent approach across New South Wales mental health services for consumer involvement in service evaluation and planning. CONCLUSIONS: A four step Framework has been developed for implementation across adult public mental health services in NSW. The Framework focuses not only on collecting consumers' views of mental health services but on ensuring that procedures to report on and make changes based on this information are in place.