High and Intensive Care in Psychiatry: Validating the HIC Monitor as a Tool for Assessing the Quality of Psychiatric Intensive Care Units.

This study aims to validate the HIC monitor as a model-fidelity scale to the High and Intensive Care (HIC) model, a recently developed model for acute psychiatric wards. To assess the psychometric properties of the HIC monitor, 37 audits were held on closed inpatient wards at 20 psychiatric hospitals in the Netherlands. Interrater reliability, construct validity and content validity were examined. Our results suggest that the HIC monitor has good psychometric properties. It can be used as a tool for assessing the implementation of the HIC model on acute psychiatric wards in the Netherlands, and for quality assessment and improvement.