Urgent Mental Health Helplines Data Collection guidance

This document describes the data that lead commissioners should ensure are provided for their urgent mental health helplines. Data should be provided by a service’s parent provider that will need to collate and co-ordinate information for supply to NHS England for the service’s national reporting. This document does not recommend nor discourage data items to be reported to local commissioners.

Service summary

The offer for the public will be a single entry point - NHS 111 - for access to urgent mental health helplines.

Calls are directed to from NHS 111 directly to mental health providers, who will be providing support 24/7 for those that identify as requiring crisis mental health support.

Where to send data 

Data will be collected by NHS England. This will be via NHS England’s data collection system. NHS England staff will provide guidance around the mechanics of data collection to suppliers of the data.

Frequency and timing of data submissions

Commissioners of an urgent mental health helpline should ensure that data are supplied on a monthly basis, in line with the timetable specified by NHS England.

Revisions

If you become aware that any previously submitted data items are incorrect, please advise NHS England using the contact details included with the published statistics.

Key performance indicators

The Urgent Mental Health Helplines Data Collection is the primary method of collecting data on urgent mental health helplines. This data will be used to produce the urgent mental health helplines key performance indicators (KPIs). To ensure accuracy of the KPIs, care should be taken to avoid double counting where appropriate.

Measuring time

Except where stated, measures of time should be in seconds, to avoid transcription errors between Excel formats.

All lead commissioners of urgent mental health helplines should be working towards the supply of all data items in this section to NHS England as outlined below; this includes specifying a parent provider for those areas with multiple contracts.

This section defines the data items that need to be supplied to NHS England. Providers should supply every data item in this section for the period where they have provided urgent mental health helpline for at least part of the time period. Information about the collection of data will be provided by NHS England separately. 

It is acknowledged that this data is experimental while data quality issues are resolved and not all data items will be comparable or reported on initially. 

A01 Number of calls received

All calls received by the mental health provider for the contract service area, or location unknown. A call is considered received at the point at which it is delivered to the provider.

The clock starts as the point at which calls are considered offered and should be the primary reference point for providers.

For the purposes of item A01, the clock starts after any call steering interactive voice response (IVR). However, IVRs should be optimised to ensure best patient experience and minimal delay.

This is an aggregated sum of all calls delivered to the provider.

A02 Calls routed through NHS 111 IVR

Of the number of calls received (A01), what number came via IVR message applied within NHS 111 call.

A03 Number of answered calls

Of the number of calls received (A01), how many were answered. To be counted as answered, a call must have been picked up by a human. Recorded messages and interactions with IVR resulting in a call back cannot be counted as answered.

B01 Number of calls answered within 60 seconds

Of the number of answered calls (A03), how many were answered within 60 seconds. The clock starts at the moment the call is queued to skill set. For the purposes of Urgent Mental Health Helplines Data Collection item B01, the clock starts after any call steering IVR.

B02 Number of calls abandoned

Number of calls abandoned. The clock starts at the moment the call is queued to skill set. For the purposes of Urgent Mental Health Helplines Data Collection item B02, the clock starts after any call steering IVR. Abandonment should be split by the following timeframes:

B03 Calls abandoned in 30 seconds or less

Of the number of calls abandoned (B02) how many were abandoned in 30 seconds or less.

B04 Calls abandoned in over 30 seconds and up to and including 60 seconds

Of the number of calls abandoned (B02) how many were abandoned in over 30 seconds and up to and including 60 seconds.

B05 Calls abandoned after 60 seconds

Of the number of calls abandoned (B02) how many were abandoned after 60 seconds.

B06 Total time to call answer

The total number of seconds spent waiting for answer, for all calls in the period. The clock starts at the moment the call is queued to skill set. For the purposes of Urgent Mental Health Helplines Data Collection item B06, the clock starts after any call steering IVR. Abandoned calls are excluded.

B07 95th centile call answer time

Across all calls in the period, what was the 95th centile time to answer each call. Example: a 95th centile call answering time of 10 minutes means that 95 out of 100 calls were answered to in less than 10 minutes. Centiles can be calculated using SQL or the Excel PERCENTILE formula and should be rounded to a whole number of seconds.

B08 99th centile call answer time

No longer required

B09 Total time of abandoned calls

The total number of seconds spent waiting for answer, for all calls in the period which were abandoned. The clock starts at the moment the call is queued to skill set.

For the purposes of Urgent Mental Health Helplines Data Collection item B09, the clock starts after any call steering IVR.