Mental Patients

(asked on 4th September 2015) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what the average discharge time was for patients in (a) NHS facilities following a first-tier mental health tribunal and (b) private mental health facilities that provide NHS services in the last year for which figures are available.


Answered by
Alistair Burt Portrait
Alistair Burt
This question was answered on 14th September 2015

The Department has not issued guidance to clinical commissioning groups on out of area mental health beds.

We do not collect the time of discharge data centrally.

Data on the average median length of stay for patients in mental health facilities is provided in the following table:

Median length of stay in days for discharged hospital spells during 2013/14 and those with an open hospital spell on 31 March 2014, by provider type

Discharges

Median LoS*

Median LoS minus Leave

Open hospital spells

Median LoS

Median LoS minus Leave

England total

116,988

23.0

20.0

23,614

117.0

112.0

NHS

112,422

23.0

19.0

21,229

102.0

96.0

Independent

4,566

23.0

22.0

2,385

434.0

427.0

Notes:

*LoS = Length of Stay

1. Leave is defined as a period of time outside of hospital, usually at home, with the intention of returning to the same ward to continue the same consultant episode

2. The Data Quality report for March 2014 showed that there was potentially a 2.5% level of duplication of open hospital providers episodes at the end of the month. For this reason the count of total hospital episodes open at the end of the month is slightly higher than that reported in the MHMDS Monthly Report for March, where the measure is a count of mental health care spells with an open hospital episode (23,246).

Source: Mental Health Minimum Dataset (MHMDS) annual file 2013/14.

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