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The Healthcare Commission has been accused of ignoring the results of its own patient survey following its decision to end scrutiny of whether mental health trusts give patients copies of their care plans.

Although giving patients copies of their care plans is a requirement of the National Service Framework for Mental Health, the commission says the indicator is no longer useful for distinguishing between the performances of trusts.

However, in the commission's patient survey last year, only two- fifths of patients reported having copies of their care plans. This figure rose to 69 per cent for patients on enhanced plans.

Moira Fraser, policy officer for the mental health charity Mind, said: "Having a copy of your plan is a fundamental part of being involved in your own care. To remove this indicator implies that they don't think it's important and trusts don't need to improve."

Mind are also concerned that the new indicator for crisis resolution teams does not expect trusts to make them all available round-the-clock.

"A crisis team that does not work out of hours is not fulfilling its function," Fraser warned.

But a spokesperson for the Healthcare Commission insisted that most dropped indicators had "reached the end of their useful life".

"Whilst we recognise that not every single person has got a care plan, it is no longer useful to differentiate between trusts," he said.

This change is part of the commission's wider move to cut targets for mental heath services. The overall number of indicators has now fallen from 38 to 28, including a fall in the number of key targets from seven to five.

Other indicators dropped include those assessing how well patients are transferred from child and adolescent to adult mental health services and from adult to older people's mental health services.

New indicators added include monitoring the proportion of drug misusers who stay the course of a 12-week treatment programme.

Another new indicator examines how successful trusts have been in reducing the numbers of people with learning difficulties in long-term NHS residences - a key aim of the Valuing People white paper.