From March 2024 all adults accessing specialist mental health care from CWP will have the opportunity to discuss and measure what is important to them.
‘DIALOG’ is a scale, designed to measure how you rate your quality of life and your experience of the care you receive. Your responses can help us to make sure we talk about what matters to you.
The DIALOG form is very simple and it has only 11 questions. The first eight questions cover different areas of your life, and the last three are about your treatment.
The questions cover your satisfaction with:
- Your mental health
- Your physical health
- With your job situation
- Your accommodation
- Your leisure activities
- Your friendships
- Your partner/family
- Your personal safety
- Your medication
- The practical help you receive
- Consultations with mental health professionals
When and how to complete DIALOG
Your mental health practitioner will talk to you about DIALOG and may ask you to complete yourself or as part of a guided discussion.
You don’t need to write out long responses or give too much detail. Just choose a number from 1 to 7 that best matches how you feel, with one being totally dissatisfied and seven being totally satisfied.
DIALOG is a personal measure. There are no wrong answers so just try to be as honest as you can. By filling in your answers at the beginning of your care, you can get a really good idea of where you are starting from in terms of quality of life.
Filling them in again later, during or at the end of your treatment, can be a useful record of where you are making progress and how well your treatment is working for you.
Any positive change is an achievement and can give you confidence. If there is little change, or your ratings get lower, we might use this as a starting point to discuss making some changes to your treatment.
By measuring quality of life, and quality of care over time, you and your clinician can work together towards making a meaningful and lasting difference to your wellbeing. We also want to improve the quality of our healthcare services and DIALOG is an important way for us to ask people what they think.
Remember you can ask your clinicians about how you can use DIALOG as a part of your care, at any time.
To download a DIALOG scale to complete at home, please click here (will open as a download).
