Mental Health Patient Level Activity and Costing 2019-20

The Patient Level Information and Costing System (PLICS) Mental Health data collection has been designed to link the costs of care contacts and hospital provider spells to Mental Health Services Data Set (MHSDS) data at record level to permit analysis such as cost by primary diagnosis. This use of data linkage limits the burden on submitting providers by minimising the number of PLICS Mental Health data items collected and ensures that a single version of activity information is used.

Further information on the MHSDS and published MHSDS data for 2019-20 are available from:

Information about the MHSDS

Mental Health Bulletin 2019-20 Annual report

All activity included in PLICS Mental Health submissions would be expected to have been submitted to the MHSDS.

Each PLICS Mental Health activity record includes two mandatory identifiers that are also mandatory fields in MHSDS:

• care contacts – Service Request ID and Care Contact ID
• hospital provider spells – Service Request ID and Hospital Provider Spell Number

For each care contact or hospital provider spell a match is sought among the 2019-20 MHSDS activity records for the same provider.

The percentages of PLICS Mental Health activity records that could be matched to an MHSDS record uniquely on both relevant identifiers for each activity type were:

The proportion of linked hospital provider spell records would not be meaningful due to the structure of the PLICS Mental Health activity data for hospital spells. Details are included in the Coherence section of the data quality statement. 

MHSDS data for 2019-20 includes activity submitted by providers that were not required to submit PLICS Mental Health data for this period, such as non-NHS providers and NHS providers in other sectors.

When comparing MHSDS and PLICS Mental Health activity counts for 2019-20 for a specific provider, please note that some activity recorded in the MHSDS was not in scope for the PLICS Mental Health collection for 2019-20.

For example, private patients, overseas visitors, patients from the devolved administrations and patients funded by the Ministry of Defence are excluded from the scope of PLICS collections.

MHSDS includes care contacts where the patient did not attend, while the PLICS Mental Health collection includes only patients who attended.

Full details of the activities in and out of scope were published in the National Cost Collection guidance.

As the submission of PLICS Mental Health data was mandated for the first time for 2019-20, the quality and completeness of the data linkage will need to be analysed before producing analysis using the linked data. Due to time constraints, it was not possible to develop the data linkage in time for publication of this report, but linkage work is planned for later in 2021.