Mental health inpatient activity
Annual - Year Ending 31 March 2024

Official statistics

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Published

10 December 2024 (Latest release)

Type

Statistical report

Author

Public Health Scotland

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• Conditions and diseases
• Mental health

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This is a National Statistics publication. National Statistics status means that this publication meets the highest standards of trustworthiness, quality and public value. This publication fully complies with the Code of Practice for Official Statistics and was awarded National Statistics status following an assessment in April 2017 by the UK Statistics Authority.

Strengths and limitations

In order to determine the quality of the statistics that we publish, PHS assesses the risk of data quality concerns (external website) for each publication. Publications are assigned a low, medium or high data quality risk rating. This rating is based on factors such as the number of data suppliers involved, the complexity of the data collection process and the quality assurance checks applied to the data. This publication has been assigned a low risk of data quality concerns.

How can the data in this publication be used?

This data can be used to:

• Compare areas across Scotland
• View trends over time
• Compare activity between different specialties, age and sex groups, or deprivation levels
• Assess whether patients were treated within or outwith their own Health Board
• Explore the relationship between hospital activity and living in a deprived area

This data should not be used to:

• Directly compare with other UK countries
• Identify areas of affluence
• Identify how much more deprived an area is from another

Data collection and validation

The data presented in this publication are sourced from hospital administrative systems across Scotland and extracted from the Scottish Morbidity Record (SMR) 01 and 04 datasets held by PHS (formerly ISD Scotland).

The Scottish Government target for SMR submission to PHS is 6 weeks following a hospital admission or discharge, or transfer/death/clinic attendance. For example, all SMR records with a March 2019 date of discharge would be expected to be submitted to PHS by 12th May 2019. NHS Boards know how complete their SMR submissions are and the extent of any backlog (data which are not submitted by the 6-week deadline) and this information is used to produce completeness figures. Further details of SMR data completeness and timeliness can be found on the SMR Completeness and Timeliness web pages respectively.

Communication with data supply partners

The SMR01 and SMR04 data used in this publication is processed and monitored by the Data Support & Monitoring Team. More information can be found on the data monitoring page.

Summary of data completeness

The above tables draw upon the data management page to present completeness for the patient-level datasets. The above completeness estimates were taken on 12 October 2024.

Data quality issues

General issues

For the financial year 2023/24, the SMR01 dataset was estimated to be 98.5% complete (as at October 2024) Whereas the SMR04 dataset was estimated to be 97% complete (as at October 2024) Completeness varied between the NHS Boards, and further information on the completeness of individual NHS Boards can be found above.

Data for State Hospital (SMR04) for 2023/24 was not available due to localised systems issues. A judgement has been made to proceed with the publication as the lower data completeness for this health board has only a very minor effect on the overall data quality for this release and is very unlikely to affect the patterns of activity seen or conclusions drawn at a national level. Data presented for the year 2023/24 is 98% complete overall, well above the 90% PHS standard for recording of data.

National Records of Scotland had not yet released mid-year population estimates for 2022 or 2023 due to staffing issues at the time of this publication. As a result, 2021 population data was used to calculate 2022 and 2023 rates data. Future publications will therefore provide a more accurate representation of crude rate data for the 2023/24 financial year.

Data quality assessment

Data sources

The data presented in this publication are sourced from hospital administrative systems across Scotland and extracted from the Scottish Morbidity Record (SMR) 04 and 01 datasets held by PHS. The specialty of learning disability is excluded from the figures published here.