A mental health service organisation is a separately constituted specialised mental health service that is responsible for the clinical governance, administration and financial management of service units providing specialised mental health care.

A specialised mental health service organisation may consist of one or more service units based in different locations and providing services in admitted patient, residential and ambulatory settings. For example, a specialised mental health service organisation may consist of several hospitals or two or more community centres.

Where the specialised mental health service organisation consists of multiple service units, those units can be considered to be components of the same organisation where they:

• operate under a common clinical governance arrangement;
• aim to work together as interlocking services that provide integrated, coordinated care to consumers across all mental health service settings; and
• share clinical records or, in the case where there is more than one physical clinical record for each patient, staff may access (if required) the information contained in all of the physical records held by the organisation for that patient.

For most states and territories, the specialised mental health service organisation is equivalent to the Area/District Mental Health Service. These are usually organised to provide the full range of admitted patient, residential and ambulatory services to a given catchment population. However, the term 'specialised mental health service organisation' may also be used to refer to health care organisations which provide only one type of mental health service (e.g. acute admitted patient care) or which serve a specialised or state-wide function.