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Mental Health Services: Hertfordshire

Volume 482: debated on Tuesday 4 November 2008

To ask the Secretary of State for Health how many residents in Hemel Hempstead have received NHS assistance for mental illness in each year since 1998; how many of those received (a) general practitioner counselling, (b) specialist counselling, (c) residence in specialist hostels and (d) hospital accommodation in each year; and what estimate he has made of the volume of such assistance which will be required in 2008-09. (231907)

Information is not available in the format requested. The following table shows the number of finished mental health consultant episodes for patients at the Hertfordshire Partnership NHS Trust from 2001-02 to 2006-07 which are the latest data available.

Finished consultant episodes

2001-02

2,505

2002-03

2,558

2003-04

2,677

2004-05

1,852

2005-06

1,471

2006-07

1,678

Notes:

Finished Consultant Episode (FCE):

A finished consultant episode (FCE) is defined as a period of admitted patient care under one consultant within one health care provider. FCEs are counted against the year in which the FCE finishes. Please note that the figures do not represent the number of patients, as a person may have more than one episode of care within the year.

Consultant Main Specialty:

This defines the specialty under which the consultant responsible for care of the patient is contracted. Care is needed when analysing HES data by specialty, or by groups of specialties (such as acute). Trusts have different ways of managing specialties and attributing codes so it is better to analyse by specific diagnoses, operations or other recorded information.

Consultant main specialties included:

710 = Mental illness

711 = Child and adolescent psychiatry

712 = Forensic psychiatry

713 = Psychotherapy

715 = Old age psychiatry (available from 1990-91)

Data Quality:

Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) are compiled from data sent by more than 300 NHS trusts and primary care trusts in England. Data are also received from a number of independent sector organisations for activity commissioned by the English NHS. The NHS Information Centre for health and social care liaises closely with these organisations to encourage submission of complete and valid data and seeks to minimise inaccuracies and the effect of missing and invalid data via HES processes. While this brings about improvement over time, some shortcomings remain.

Assessing growth through time:

HES figures are available from 1989-90 onwards. During the years that these records have been collected by the NHS there have been ongoing improvements in quality and coverage. These improvements in information submitted by the NHS have been particularly marked in the earlier years and need to be borne in mind when analysing time series.

Some of the increase in figures for later years (particularly 2006-07 onwards) may be due to the improvement in the coverage of independent sector activity.

Source:

Hospital Episode Statistics (HES), The NHS Information Centre for health and social care