National mental health statistics that shed new light on care and treatment for patients are now available at the click of a mouse thanks to the latest interactive data hub created by NHS Digital.
The online hub, which will be formally launched on World Mental Health Day, enables healthcare workers, patients, carers, charities and researchers to find the information most relevant to them at their fingertips.
The Mental Health Data Hub includes published official figures for England from NHS Digital’s datasets.
This includes information on the number of people in contact with mental health services, the proportion of mental health, learning disability and autism service users admitted as an inpatient and estimates for the number of staff in the mental health and learning disability workforce.
Users can view the data in visualisations including charts and graphs and select providers or geographical areas of interest.
As soon as the latest data is published, it is uploaded to the hub. The most recent addition is data from Mental Health Act Statistics, Annual Figures 2017-18, which were published today.
This is the second data hub to be created by NHS Digital, following the launch of the GP Data Hub last year.
One of NHS Digital’s strategic aims is to make it easier for people to access the array of data about health and social care which it collects to help improve care.
Ramesh Notra, Principal Information Analyst in Community and Mental Health at NHS Digital, said: “The Mental Health Data Hub is a key tool to enable people to access our mental health statistics more easily and in an interactive way.
“The dashboards have been designed to guide users to the key information and allow them to investigate further using the interactive features provided.
“The data hub also provides links to sources of mental health data produced by other organisations.
“As well as improving access, we hope the hub will assist in our efforts to improve data quality by enabling organisations to see how they compare in terms of data submissions.
“We hope mental health professionals, patients, carers and researchers find the hub useful and we would urge them to let us know what they think via the link on the homepage.
“We are keen to ensure it meets the needs of users, so we really value feedback and will continue to make improvements in response.”
The Mental Health Data Hub can be found here
