Coverage/Scope:

All public mental health service organisations.

The following exclusions apply:

• Mental health clients for which a unique person identifier was not recorded, that is non-uniquely identifiable clients, are to be excluded.

Methodology:

• Tracking a consumer’s service use back from the date of first contact in the reference period should be calculated as the five years preceding the date of first contact rather than on a calendar or financial year basis.
• Consumer counts should be unique at the organisation level.

(Numerator ÷ Denominator) x 100

Number of new consumers who received services from the mental health service organisation’s specialised mental health services within the reference period.

Number of consumers who received services from the mental health service organisation’s specialised mental health services within the reference period.

Service variables: Setting, target population

Consumer attributes: Age, SEIFA, remoteness, Indigenous status

Levels at which indicator can be useful for benchmarking:

• mental health service organisation
• regional group of services
• state/territory.

This indicator cannot be accurately constructed using mental health National Minimum Data Sets because they do not include unique patient identifiers that allow links across data sets and financial reporting years.

There is no proxy solution available. Construction of this indicator at a national level requires separate indicator data to be provided individually by states and territories.

Development of state-wide unique patient identifiers within all mental health NMDSs is needed to improve this capacity.

• This indicator presents complexities at the analysis stage. For example, there are several approaches to defining ‘new client’ that depend on how the following issues are resolved:
  • Level of the mental health system at which ‘newness’ is defined: Consumers new to a particular organisation may be existing consumers of other organisations. Counts of new consumers at the state/territory level would certainly yield lower estimates than those derived from organisation-level counts.
  • Diagnosis criteria for defining ‘newness’: A consumer may present with a new condition, although they have received previous treatment for a different condition.
• To date, the approach has been to specify an initial measure for implementation with a view to further refinement following detailed work to address the complexities associated with the definition of a new consumer and the possible implementation of unique state-wide patient identifiers within all jurisdictions.
• This work does not take into account the activities of private mental health services, primary mental health care or the specialist private mental health sector.

Australian Institute of Health and Welfare on behalf of the National Mental Health Performance Subcommittee

Key Performance Indicators for Australian Public Mental Health Services, Third edition (2014)