Measuring outcomes in patients with depression or anxiety: an essential part of clinical practice

To the Editor: I do not believe that Dinnen's comments1 should be so easily dismissed as suggested by the academics proposing that general practitioners should do questionnaires,2,3 at least in New South Wales.

I write this as barely a month has passed since a most damning report was released by a NSW Parliamentary Inquiry into Mental Health Delivery.

A prime example of arrogance and loss of contact with the reality of clinical services by academia and administration is that, during the demise of mental health services in NSW, the services have been forced to complete a new 30-page admission process for every admission. Just what was needed by registrars spending hours trying to find beds for seriously mentally ill patients!

The gulf between academia and administration on the one hand and real clinical services on the other is now huge in NSW, at least in mental health services. No one outside real clinical services has any credibility or right to demand doctors, let alone hard-pressed GPs, engage in dubious and very likely useless research projects without very special funding to support the project.

I found the K10 questionnaire extraordinarily simplistic compared with a Mental State Examination (MSE). Surely, if there is concern, doctors should be encouraged to revise how the MSE is carried out, and not encouraged to adopt "cookbook" medicine.