Mental Health Act Statistics, Annual Figures, 2023-24

National Statistics status means that official statistics meet the highest standards of trustworthiness, quality and public value.

All official statistics should comply with all aspects of the Code of Practice for Official Statistics. They are awarded National Statistics status following an assessment by the Authority’s regulatory arm. The Authority considers whether the statistics meet the highest standards of Code compliance, including the value they add to public decisions and debate.

It is NHS England's responsibility to maintain compliance with the standards expected of National Statistics. If we become concerned about whether these statistics are still meeting the appropriate standards, we will discuss any concerns with the Authority promptly.

Find out more about the Code of Practice for Official Statistics using the link at the bottom of this page.

This publication may be of interest to members of the public, policy officials and other stakeholders to make local and national comparisons and to monitor the quality and effectiveness of services.

Since 2016-17, these statistics are primarily produced from the Mental Health Services Data Set (MHSDS). Previously these statistics were produced from the KP90 aggregate data collection.

The MHSDS re-uses operational data from service providers to produce statistics about NHS-funded mental health services in England.

NHS England publishes statistics from the MHSDS each month, including some information about people subject to the Act.

This annual publication includes all of the measures previously produced from the KP90. This supports the continued monitoring of uses of the Act in health services.

The MHSDS provides a much richer data source for these statistics, allowing for new insights into uses of the Act. Some of these new insights are shown in this report. However, some providers are not yet submitting MHSDS data, or submitting incomplete data and so figures must be interpreted with caution. Guidance is provided in this publication.

Improvements in MHSDS data quality have continued over the past year. NHS England is working with partners to ensure that all providers are submitting complete data. However these improvements are offset by poor data quality from some Acute providers.

The majority of uses of the Mental Health Act occur in specialist mental health facilities. These organisations must submit information about these uses to the MHSDS, whether they are NHS facilities or independent service providers.

A small proportion of uses occur in Acute hospitals. This includes detentions or uses of short term orders that occur in emergency departments. Since 2018-19, acute providers can submit this information to the new Emergency Care Data Set (ECDS). Previously this information about the Act was collected in a separate Acute return.

This publication includes data from both of these data sources.

The following analysis shows that MHSDS data quality continues to improve. More independent service providers have provided 12 months’ data to the MHSDS, enabling us to provide detention figures for the whole year. Compared to last year, ECDS data quality has improved but not markedly so. As such the ECDS data still does not represent a full picture of detentions occurring within Acute settings. There continues to be a negative impact on the national totals for detentions and short term orders because of this. It should also be noted that data from one independent provider who recorded a small number of detentions has been excluded from the ECDS analysis in order to allow the publication of the NHS providers split. This decision has been made in order to preserve the utility of the data.

Further guidance is provided in the Background Data Quality Report.