Coverage/Scope:

All public community mental health service organisations.

The following episodes (and related outcomes measures) are excluded:

• brief ambulatory episode of mental health care.

Methodology:

• Consumer self-assessment measures that are specific to each jurisdiction need to be considered in the construction of this indicator, that is, Mental Health Inventory (MHI), Behavior and Symptom Identification Scale (BASIS-32) and Kessler-10-Plus (K10+).
• Only the following versions of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) are to be considered in the construction of this indicator:
  * The parent-rated version for children aged 4 to 10,
  * Either the parent-rated version and/or the self-report version for adolescents aged 11 to 17.
• Non-mandated measures (such as the teacher-version of the SDQ) should not be considered in the construction of this indicator.
• All completed returns (of mandated measures) are to be considered in the construction of the numerator. For example, if both a parent-rated version and self-report version of the SDQ is received this would count as two completed outcome measures.

(Numerator ÷ Denominator) x 100

Number of in-scope episodes of ambulatory mental health care with completed consumer self-assessment outcome measures.

Number of in-scope episodes of ambulatory mental health care in the reference period.

Service variables: target population.

Consumer variables: age.

N[NN].N

Levels at which this indicator can be useful for benchmarking:

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

This indicator cannot be constructed, as estimates of the total number of episodes requiring outcome measures are not provided directly to the National Outcomes and Casemix Collection (NOCC).

A proxy solution is to use estimates from the Community Mental Health Care National Minimum Data Set.

Longer term, a process is needed that allows data reported to the national collection for consumers who begin an episode in a given year to be tracked when the episode continues into subsequent years. Work is underway to build an episode identifier into the NOCC to enable this. Additionally, consistent, cross-year use of service identifiers and unique identifiers for consumers by states and territories is necessary to enable full capacity to construct this indicator using the NOCC.

• Given the different protocol requirements across service settings the national indicator is only constructed for the ambulatory setting. This is not to diminish the importance of the use of the measures within acute inpatient (for child and adolescent) and residential settings.
• The NOCC protocol requires that consumer self‑assessment outcome measures be offered at the commencement of care and at maximum intervals of 91 days thereafter until completion of care, at which point an exit measure is offered.