Coverage/Scope:

State/territory public acute admitted patient mental health care service units in scope for reporting as defined by the Mental Health Establishments National Minimum Data Set (NMDS) (admissions data).

State/territory specialised community mental health care service unit(s) in scope for reporting as defined by the Community Mental Health Care National Minimum Data Set (pre-admission community contact data).

The following admissions are excluded:

• Same-day admissions;
• Statistical and change of care type admissions;
• Admissions by transfer from another acute or psychiatric inpatient hospital;
• Admissions by transfer from a residential mental health care service;
• Separations where length of stay is one night only and procedure code for Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) is recorded.

The following community mental health service contacts are excluded:

• Service contacts on the day of admission;
• Contacts where a consumer does not participate.

Service contacts can be provided by any community mental health care service within the state/territory.

Methodology:

Reference period for 2016 performance reporting: 2014–15

• 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.
• For the purpose of this indicator, when a mental health service organisation has more than one unit of a particular admitted patient care program, those units should be combined.
• The categorisation of the specialised mental health admitted patient service unit is based on the principal purpose(s) of the admitted patient care program rather than the classification of individual consumers.
• One of the following Australian Classification of Health Interventions (ACHI)  ECT procedure codes are recorded:
  • ACHI 5th edition (2006–2008) use procedure codes 93340-02 and 93340-43.
  • ACHI 6th and 7th editions (2008 to current) use procedure codes 93341-00 to 93341-99.
  • ACHI 5th, 6th and 7th editions (2006 to current). Electroconvulsive therapy Block 1907 may be selected to capture all data regardless of code changes over time

Different results for the seven day pre-admission community care indictor will be achieved depending on whether the indicator is based on organisation-level or state-level analysis. The key difference between the two approaches concerns whether pre-admission community care is regarded to have occurred only when the person is seen by the discharging organisation, or by any public mental health service within the jurisdiction. The preferred approach is for state-level analysis to be used, and for contacts provided by any public mental health service to be counted. This will depend however, on the capacity of jurisdictions to track service use across multiple service organisation providers and will not be possible for all jurisdictions, the details of which are explored in the data quality statement for this indicator.

(Numerator ÷ Denominator) x 100

Number of in-scope admissions to state/territory public acute admitted patient mental health care service unit(s) for which a community mental health service contact, in which the consumer participated, was recorded in the seven days immediately preceding that admission.

Number of in-scope admissions to state/territory public acute admitted patient mental health care service unit(s) occurring within the reference period.

Service variables: Nil

Consumer attributes: Age, sex, Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas (SEIFA), remoteness, Indigenous status

Disaggregated data excludes missing or not reported data.

All disaggregation data are to be calculated as at admission to the admitted mental health care service unit, even if the value is null.

Australian Institute of Health and Welfare

Australian Institute of Health and Welfare

Australian Institute of Health and Welfare

State/territory level

This indicator cannot be accurately constructed using the Admitted Patient Mental Health Care and Community Mental Health Care National Minimum Data Sets because they do not share a common unique identifier that would allow persons admitted to hospital to be tracked in the community services data. Additionally, states and territories vary in the extent to which state-wide unique identifiers are in place to that would allow accurate tracking of persons who are seen by multiple organisations.

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

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

• The reliability of this indicator is dependent on the implementation of state-wide unique patient identifiers as the community services may not necessarily be delivered by the same mental health service organisation that admits the consumer to hospital care. Access to state-wide data is required to construct this indicator accurately.
• This measure does not consider variations in intensity or frequency of contacts prior to admission to hospital.
• This measure does not distinguish qualitative differences between phone and face‐to‐face community contacts.

When data for this indicator are requested jurisdictions are required to answer 'yes' or 'no' to the question "seven day pre-admission contact based on tracking pre-admission service contacts across all state/territory public mental health services?". A 'yes' response implies that a statewide unique client identifier system is in place, or some comparable approach has been used in the data analysis to allow tracking of service utilisation by an individual consumer across all public mental health services in the jurisdiction. Collection of this information is aimed at assessing the degree of consistency between jurisdictions in data reported.

National Mental Health Performance Subcommittee 2013. Key Performance Indicators for Australian Public Mental Health Services 3rd edn. Canberra. NMHPC.