Mental Health Services Monthly Statistics

The expansion in the scope of the data set means that many of the basic measures in this monthly release now cover a wider set of services than in the previous release. We have introduced service level breakdowns for some measures to provide new information to users, but also to provide comparability with key measures in the previous release (for example, by providing breakdowns for adult mental health services). Full details can be found in the Metadata file that accompanies each publication.

We have also introduced new data products and reports as we start to exploit the wider scope of the data set to provide information about learning disabilities services and children and young people's mental health services, and to support the introduction of waiting times for mental health services.

Given improvements to reporting over time, the Mental Health Services Monthly Statistics publication is now classed as official statistics. The classification of official statistics is in keeping with the UK Statistics Authority's Code of Practice. A full explanation of how this publication meets the criteria for official statistics can also be found on the Data Quality page within the publication. Official statistics are statistics produced by Crown bodies and other organisations listed within an Official Statistics Order, on behalf of the UK government or devolved administrations. They provide a factual basis for assessment and decisions on economic, social and environmental issues at all levels of society.

The series continues to evolve but as a minimum each release contains:

• a number of data files with both national and subnational figures for a variety of activity and caseload measures. These are designed to provide the basis for discussions between providers and commissioners, and the building blocks of some quality and performance measures
• a set of provider level data quality measures
• time series files which underpin published visualisations giving users access to time series data
• a detailed metadata file, which provides contextual information for each measure, including a full description, current uses, and the method used for analysis

This information will be of particular interest to organisations involved in the delivery of secondary mental health and learning disability services, as it presents timely information to support discussions between providers and commissioners of services.

For patients, researchers, agencies and the wider public it aims to provide up to date information about the numbers of people using services, spending time in psychiatric hospitals and subject to the Mental Health Act (MHA). Some of these measures are currently experimental analysis.

All the measures can be produced from analysis of the monthly extracts available to providers (via Strategic Data Collection Service Cloud) and commissioners (via Data Services for Commissioners Regional Offices), although many measures use data from previous submissions.

Data are produced at commissioner level for Learning Disabilities and Autism (LDA) inpatients that are accessing the mental health services in the month.

The following document provides the logic used in the development of the commissioner measure reported in Mental Health Services Data Set (MHSDS).

If you wish to access the full description of how the commissioner logic works with MHSDS, this can be found in the appendix section of the MHSDS user guidance document.