Statistics on people with a learning disability and autistic people in mental health hospitals, AT: May 2026, MHSDS: April 2026

To provide more timely statistics in the Mental Health Services Monthly Statistics and Learning Disability Services publication series, from October 2023 activity, revised submission windows were introduced to support a move to reporting performance data in the month following activity.  Editions of the series from October 2023 onwards are affected by this change, and each publication page will contain data relating to one month only.

The September 2023 performance publication contains all data relating to the reporting period in it.

The October 2023 performance publication does likewise with the exception of restraints data.  This is because the restraints data was published in the second month following the activity.  Providers have indicated that there is often some delay until the restraints data is available for them to submit. As a result, the timeliness with which NHS England receives restraints did not initially support 'first cut' reporting.

As a result, publications from the October 2023 performance to the September 2024 performance publication had ‘second cut’ restraints data added to them when the next month's publication was released. 

Timeliness of restraints data was kept under review over this period.  As of the October 2024 performance publication onwards, NHS England has moved to reporting ‘first cut’ restraints data.

For this publication people are identified in MHSDS as having learning disabilities and/or autistic spectrum disorder (LDA) characteristics within their submitted data for the reporting period (Full details of the method used to identify people with learning disabilities and/or autism are provided in the metadata file). These measures are presented for referrals and inpatient activity, in data tables and a CSV file.

These measures show the volumes of patients accessing services throughout the month. This is summarised into five types of measurements:

1. Open referrals/inpatients accessing services at the start of the reporting period
2. New referrals/ admissions during the month
3. Referrals closing/ discharges during the month
4. Referrals opening and closing/ inpatients admitted and discharged within the month
5. Open referrals/ inpatients accessing services at the end of the reporting period

The inpatient data has been created to replicate the measures currently available in the Assuring Transformation publication. It includes patients with ‘a bed’ normally designated for the treatment or care of people with a learning disability or those with ‘a bed’ designated for mental illness treatment or care who have been diagnosed or are understood to have a learning disability and/or autistic spectrum disorder.

We would welcome feedback on both the methodology we have used to identify the cohort of patients, and the reported measures. Please send any comments to [email protected]

A group of measures about hospital spells and ward stays open at the end of the month can be used to provide a detailed picture of inpatient caseload at National, Provider and CCG of registration or residence level. Each measure has a unique identifier (referenced in the metadata file), to ensure that users know what is represented by each measure.

This national picture is incomplete without full submissions from all providers of inpatient services and gaps in the provision of information from independent sector providers will also affect the figures at subnational level to varying degrees. See the data quality section of this report for more details. These are experimental statistics and should be used with caution, using all the other available information about data quality to aid interpretation.

To prevent the release of disclosive information, for the majority of statistics within this publication any numbers less than five (including zero) are replaced by a “*” symbol. Please note for tables 15-18 of the data tables, this also denotes where a submission has been made but data in the relevant table has not been provided. All other numbers are rounded to the nearest five. Calculated values in the data files are based on unrounded numbers but rounded to the nearest whole percent to prevent backward calculation. Where a value is suppressed, the corresponding percentage is also suppressed. This approach prevents identification of a person through cross referencing different publications.

In line with the NHS Anonymisation Standard, since the total population of inpatients identified as having a learning disability and/or autism is less than 10,000, this disclosure control has been applied to national figures as well as sub-national figures.

Multiple submission window model for MHSDS

Mental Health Data Hub - NHS Digital