Mental Health America applauds the Biden Administration and the Centers for Medicaid & Medicare Services (CMS) for issuing final rules requiring inpatient psychiatric facilities to measure patient experience of care. While general hospitals have measured patient experience for decades for physical health conditions, psychiatric facilities did not have similar requirements for people experiencing mental health conditions.
"MHA is very grateful to the Biden Administration for their commitment to addressing discriminatory policies that harm people with mental health conditions and recognizing the importance of measuring how people are treated when they are receiving care," said Mary Giliberti, chief public policy officer at Mental Health America.
MHA has a long history of elevating the voices of people with lived experience in programs and policies. MHA's founder, Clifford Beers, spoke out about the abuse and neglect he experienced in psychiatric facilities in the early 1900s, and MHA and its partners filed hundreds of comments with CMS in recent years noting that people are often not treated with dignity and respect when receiving care and it was important to incentivize good care and have transparent, comparable information.