Out of Area Placements in Mental Health Services: May 2017
Publication of a collection to specifically look at mental health patients being treated outside their provider of usual treatment. Data covering May 2017.
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This report presents early findings from the Out of Area Placements (OAPs) collection. The collection is expected to capture the details of all OAPs in England from both NHS and independent providers. This collection is running for an interim 12 month period only to allow necessary changes to the Mental Health Services Dataset (MHSDS) to be implemented. The MHSDS is the chosen mechanism for the long term collection of this data.
This report is the eighth monthly report of Out of Area Placements (OAPs) and it should be interpreted with caution due to some likely shortfalls in coverage, similar to the earlier reports.
The Government set a national ambition to eliminate inappropriate Out of Area Placements (OAPs) in mental health services for adults in acute inpatient care by 2020-21. Inappropriate OAPs are where patients are sent out of area because no bed is available for them locally which can delay their recovery. It is essential to introduce a collection of OAPs data in order to monitor progress towards achieving the ambition and to understand where and why OAPs are happening.
Having this information is critical to improving patient care and ultimately eliminating the practice of inappropriately sending patients out of area to receive acute inpatient care. This collection is for providers in England only. This report is being published as Experimental Statistics in order to get user feedback, show some detailed breakdowns for where data have been submitted and improve providers’ data quality.