National Healthcare Agreement: PI 25-Rate of community follow up within first seven days of discharge from a psychiatric admission, 2015

Collection and usage attributes

An ambulatory mental health service contact is the provision of a clinically significant service by a specialised mental health service provider(s) for patients/clients, (other than those patients/clients admitted to psychiatric hospitals or designated psychiatric units in acute care hospitals, and those residents in specialised residential mental health services), where the nature of the service would normally warrant a dated entry in the clinical record of the patient/client in question.  

Should there be a discrepancy in the demographic variables of the consumer between collections, then the variables in the hospital collection should prevail.

2012–13—Nationally (percentage only), by 2011 Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas (SEIFA) Index of Relative Socio-economic Disadvantage (IRSD) deciles.

2012–13—State and territory (numerator, denominator and percentage).

2012–13—State and territory, by:

• Indigenous status
• remoteness (Australian Statistical Geography Standard (ASGS) Remoteness Structure) of consumer.

Some disaggregations may result in numbers too small for publication.

Most recent data available for 2015 National Healthcare Agreement (NHA) performance reporting: 2012-13.

The scope includes all public mental health service organisations' acute psychiatric inpatient units.

The following separations are excluded:

• Same day separations.
• Statistical and change of care type separations.
• Separations that end by transfer to another acute or psychiatric inpatient hospital.
• Separations that end by death, left against medical advice/discharge at own risk.
• Separations that end by transfer to community residential mental health services.

The following community ambulatory mental health service contacts are excluded from the calculation:

• Service contacts occurring on day of separation.

Same day separations are defined as inpatient episodes where the admission and separation dates are the same.

Implementation of this indicator requires the capacity to track service use across inpatient and community boundaries and is dependent on the capacity to link patient identifiers.

Where a mental health service organisation has more than one unit of a particular service type for the purpose of this indicator those units should be combined.

The reliability of cross-jurisdictional comparisons on this indicator is dependent on the implementation of statewide unique patient identifiers as the community services may not necessarily be delivered by the same mental health service organisation that admits the patient.

This measure does not consider variations in intensity or frequency of service contacts following discharge from hospital.

This measure does not distinguish qualitative differences between phone and face-to-face community contacts.

For 2011–12 data, the 2011 SEIFA IRSD quintile and decile data were produced using the Australian Geography Classification geographical unit of Statistical Local Area. For 2012–13 data, the 2011 SEIFA IRSD quintile and decile data, will be produced using the Australian Statistical Geography Standard geographical unit of Statistical Area 2.

Representational attributes

Data source attributes

Accountability attributes

Australian Institute of Health and Welfare

Specification: Substantial work required, the measure requires significant work to be undertaken.

Full implementation of this measure requires unique statewide patient identifiers – currently available in six of the eight states and territories and under development in the remaining two. 

Source and reference attributes

Relational attributes