Access to mental health (MH) care continues to be a challenging issue for VHA. There is some recent concern that the VA needs to develop access measures that more accurately reflect the patient experience of accessing mental health care. This is especially important with the increased use of digital technology to deliver health care interventions at a distance. In order to better understand this problem we will talk directly with VA patients in an open-ended way about their experience accessing mental health services. We will use this information to develop a patient-centered survey to measure perceived access to mental health services. We will then test the validity and reliability of this measure. The final version of the PAI from this study wil then be available for use by our partners in VA Central Office and other researchers.

I01HX001114

2014-03-01

2019-03-31