National Healthcare Agreement: PI 25–Rate of community follow up within first seven days of discharge from a psychiatric admission, 2020

Collection and usage attributes

A community 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.

Demographic variables of the consumer are to be based on the data from the hospital admission record, even if the result is null or invalid.

100 x (Numerator ÷ Denominator)

Number of in-scope separations from the mental health service organisation's acute psychiatric inpatient unit(s) for which a community ambulatory mental health service contact, in which the consumer participated, was recorded in the 7 days following that separation.

Number of in-scope separations for the mental health service organisation's acute psychiatric inpatient unit(s).

2017–18—Nationally (percentage only), by 2016 Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas (SEIFA) Index of Relative Socio-Economic Disadvantage (IRSD) deciles (not reported).

2017–18—State and territory (numerator, denominator and percentage).

2017–18—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 2020 National Healthcare Agreement performance reporting: 2017–18.

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.
• Separations where length of stay is one night only and procedure code for electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is recorded.
• Separations that end by transfer to community residential mental health services.

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

• Service contacts occurring on day of separation.
• Contacts where a consumer does not participate.

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 1 unit of a particular service type for the purpose of this indicator those units should be combined.

All acute admitted mental health service units are in scope for this indicator, including short-stay units and emergency acute mental health admitted units.

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 separation from hospital.

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

For 2017–18 data, the 2016 SEIFA IRSD quintile and decile data will be produced using the ASGS geographical unit of Statistical Area Level 2.

Australian Classification of Health Interventions (ACHI) ECT procedure codes are:

• ACHI 5th edition use procedure codes 93340-02 and 93340-43.
• ACHI 6th to 9th editions use procedure codes 93341-00 to 93341-99.
• ACHI 5th to 10th editions Electroconvulsive therapy Block [1907] may be selected to capture all data regardless of code changes over time.
• ACHI 10th edition use procedure codes 14224-00 to 14224-06.

Representational attributes

N[NN].N

Data source attributes

Accountability attributes

National Healthcare Agreement

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