A pilot study of the Health of the Nation Outcome Scale as a measurement of outcome in a private psychiatric hospital.

In this era of increasing accountability in health care there is a need for an easily administered reliable instrument to assess the outcome of patients treated for psychiatric illness. This need has been reviewed comprehensively by Andrews et al [1]. One of the several instruments they recommended was the Health of the Nation Outcome Scale instrument (HoNOS) [2,3]. This paper describes the introduction of the HoNOS in a private hospital setting.