Expanding your submission

This section of the guidance assumes that you have made a successful submission of the mandatory tables and are now looking to increase the data you provide to us. This is important because the measures we use for reporting and monitoring take information from across the whole dataset, not just the mandatory tables or fields.

As mentioned in the mandatory tables section, there are 62 tables in the MHSDS. You will not need to submit data to all of these tables, but you are required to submit all tables for which you have relevant information. This will depend on what services you provide and what data you collect locally.

The most likely next steps for your organisation after the mandatory tables are patient appointments and/or inpatient stays.

Patient appointments are covered by tables MHS201 – MHS204.

Inpatient stays are covered by tables MHS501 – MHS514.

The user guidance and Technical Output Specification describe every table and field in detail, so this guidance does not aim to replace those resources. You do not need to read them cover to cover, but you must become familiar with the areas that are relevant to you, as they are an invaluable resource. The more you work with the MHSDS, the more comfortable you will become with these documents.

As a starting point, we have created plain English explanations for whether a table is likely to be relevant to your organisation. However, this cannot be a comprehensive guide for everybody, due to the size of the MHSDS and the amount of variation across providers.

Out of Area Placements (OAPs)

An Out of Area Placement is when a patient is admitted to a unit that is not part of the usual local network of services. OAPs are currently submitted to NHS Digital via a separate collection on the Clinical Audit Platform (CAP), as well as via the MHSDS. In order to reduce burden on providers, we are working to eliminate the CAP collection so that you only have to submit this data once.

However, data on OAPs submitted to the MHSDS is not yet of sufficient quality to retire the separate collection. It is therefore vital that you use the resources below to familiarise yourself with how to report OAPs, as both the sender and the receiver of a patient in these circumstances.

You only need to report OAPs for adults whose care is commissioned by CCGs (i.e. not specialist care). Therefore, only OAPs within the following bed types should be reported to both the MHSDS and CAP:

• general adult acute mental health
• older adult acute mental health
• Psychiatric intensive care unit (PICU)

Quick guide to submitting Out of Area Placements (OAPs) – high level summary of the required fields

Improving data quality of Out of Area Placements (OAPs) – more detail on how to report OAPs in the MHSDS

8 June 2021: Mental Health Services Dataset – Out of Area Placements (OAPs) webinar - overview of requirements and discussion of data quality issues

Out of Area Placements (OAPs)  - the CAP collection and background on OAPs. 

The DQMI is the Data Quality Maturity Index and is a measure of completeness of the data you send to us. The fields that impact your DQMI score are listed in the DQMI Methodology guidance.  

There are two measures that can be used to monitor the access of children and young people to mental health services:

MHS69 – The number of children and young people, regardless of when their referral started, receiving at least two contacts (including indirect contacts) and where their first contact occurs before their 18th birthday

MHS95 – Number of CYP aged under 18 supported through NHS funded mental health with at least one contact (12 month rolling)

Both measures require you to submit the tables MHS201CareContact and/or MHS204IndirectActivity. Contacts must have been attended (AttendOrDNACode is 5 or 6) and ConsMechanismMH must be 01 (Face to face), 02 (Telephone), 04 (Talk type) or 11 (Video call).

For more information see our Quick guide to submitting Children and Young People (CYP) Access measures.

A dedicated workspace is available on the FutureNHS website to support data quality improvement for specialised commissioning.

To access the area:

• if you already have a FutureNHS account, visit the workspace homepage
• if you do not have a FutureNHS account but have an nhs.net or nhs.uk email account, you can register for access to the website
• other users can request access by emailing [email protected]