Mental health Act data quality plan

Activities

We will use this page to keep users informed of ongoing and planned data quality activities, including future developments. These future developments will be influenced by the NHS Long Term Plan and the response to the Independent Review of the Mental Health Act.

We have taken action around the improvement of recording for key MHSDS data used in the reporting of Mental Health Act statistics.

These data include, but are not limited to: 

• section type and use of legal status codes
• the section under which a patient is detained
• demographics information of patients
• admission and detention times of patients
• transfers of patients
• informal episodes – those patients voluntarily having in-patient treatment
• duplicate episodes – errors within the data

The action involved analysis of submitted data for the above data items, which highlighted care providing organisations where this data was incomplete or inadequately recorded. We engaged, and continue to communicate, with these organisations to support them in the improvement of their data.

We took focused action around Community Treatment Orders (CTOs), engaging with providers directly to eliminate erroneous data and ensuring there is clarity on the appropriate method of flowing CTO data.

For Part 3 of the Mental Health Act (Patients Concerned in Criminal Proceedings or Under Sentence), we plan future action which will be undertaken through detailed analysis of both submitted data and other data sources to identify underlying data quality issues and highlighting the care providing organisations responsible for these issues. This will be followed by direct work with the identified organisations to support them in improving the submitted data.

Future work 

The nature of future work will be guided by the NHS Long Term Plan and the response to the Independent Review of the Mental Health Act. We will continue to work with the wider healthcare system to prioritise and undertake these activities and keep this page updated with those activities.