Admitted patient care

Information sources

Admitted patient mental health care is defined as specialised psychiatric care for patients admitted to stand-alone psychiatric hospitals and specialised psychiatric wards in general acute hospitals. Data on admitted patient mental health care are available in two categories, establishment-level and patient-level. Establishment-level data pertains to workforce, expenditure and activity characteristics of the service.

The patient-level data includes the patient's socio-demographic details, data on the diagnosis and information on the duration and nature of the stay in admitted care. The information sources for patient-level and establishment-level admitted patient data are outlined below.

Establishment-level information

Nationwide information about the characteristics of hospitals providing specialised mental health care are collected by two data collections.

The National Minimum Data Set (NMDS) for Public Hospital Establishments is collected by the AIHW Hospitals Unit and includes expenditure, workforce and activity data from public hospital establishments. These data are stored in the National Public Hospital Establishments Database (NPHED). Data on stand-alone public psychiatric hospitals and basic data on psychiatric units in acute hospitals have been extracted from the NPHED and published in the Mental Health Services in Australia 2005-06.

The National Survey of Mental Health Service (NSMHS) is conducted to monitor the progress of the National Mental Health Strategy and includes data on expenditure, workforce and activity by specialised mental health care services. Summary data from the NSMHS are published by the Australian Government Department of Health and Ageing [External link] in the annual series of National Mental Health Reports.

Patient-level information

The only national collection of patient-level data for admitted patient mental health services is the National Minimum Data Set (NMDS) for Admitted Patient Mental Health Care. This data set has been collected since 1 July 1997. These data include patient demographics, clinical diagnosis items and service episode characteristics. Summary patient-level data for 2005-06 were reported in the Mental Health Services in Australia 2005-06 and are available online via an interactive National hospital morbidity data cube. The data cube can be used to create customised tables based on the age group, sex and principle diagnosis of patients who received specialised psychiatric care.