Coverage/Scope:

All public mental health service organisations.

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

Methodology:

• Requires a non-duplicated consumer count across all settings.
• Statistical local area codes or postcodes recorded at the time of community contact need to be mapped to mental health service organisation catchment population boundaries.

(Numerator ÷ Denominator) x 100

Number of consumers who reside in the defined catchment area who received services from the mental health service organisation’s specialised mental health services within the reference period.

Number of mental health consumers who reside in the mental health service organisation’s defined catchment area within the reference period.

Service variables: nil.

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

N[NN].N

Levels at which the indicator can be useful for benchmarking:

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

This indicator cannot be accurately constructed using the mental health National Minimum Data Sets (NMDSs) because the data sets do not include unique patient identifiers that allow linkage across data sets.

A proxy solution is to use only the Community Mental Health Care NMDS, which is estimated to include more than 90% of all persons by public mental health services. The accuracy of this solution is limited by the fact that states and territories vary in the extent to which unique patient identifiers are available on a state-wide basis.

Accurate 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-related NMDSs is needed to improve this capacity.

• As defined populations may receive services from organisations other than their catchment provider, this measure is not a ‘pure’ indicator of mental health service organisation performance but more about service utilisation by the population they serve. However, it is regarded as an important indicator to understand the overall relationship of the mental health service organisation in relation to its catchment population needs.
• Resource allocation based on psychiatric epidemiology, associated morbidity and disability, mortality and socio-demographic factors is generally regarded as resulting in a more equitable distribution of resources in relation to local need than funding strategies based on service-utilisation and population size alone. This indicator advances these concepts by creating scope in the future to compare expected treatment rates to actuals.
• This measure does not consider the roles of primary mental health care or the specialist private mental health sector. While people who received care from specialist non-government organisations are not counted, it is expected that the majority of these people will be captured by the activities of clinical services.
• This measure may under-report levels of service access in areas where persons are able to access public sector mental health services across jurisdictional boundaries.

ABS (Australian Bureau of Statistics) 2008. National survey of mental health and wellbeing: summary of results, Australia, 2007. ABS cat. no. 4326.0. Canberra: ABS.

National Mental Health Performance Subcommittee (NMHPSC) 2013. Key Performance Indicators for Australian Public Mental Health Services, 3rd edn. Canberra: NMHPSC.