A National Collection of Mental Health Information


The Ministry of Health's Mental health Information Strategy (2005)
identified the need for good quality information to support the future development of mental health services. Mental health service activity and consumer outcomes information at a national level is needed to determine whether the investment in the mental health system is making a difference.

Many of the people supported by NGOs do not have any service activity reported to the existing national collection. Platform's NGOIT 2005 Landscape Survey indicated that many NGOs are currently collecting data of one sort or another but that very little of this information is being communicated to external agencies. This means that the work of NGOs does not feature in national reporting.  It is hoped that the PRIMHD project for NGOs will begin to address this significant gap.

Mental Health Pricing Project 
Whilst this is annual practice for the District Health Boards, a NGO trial was undertaken in 2006/7 more...

Key Performance Indicators (KPI)
The Ministry of Health funded this project to develop a national set of key performance indicators intended to provide a mechanism for mental health services to improve quality, to benchmark against other services and to target performance improvement efforts more...

Programme for the Integration of Mental Health Data - PRIMHD 
Mental health service activity and consumer outcomes information at a national level is needed to determine whether the investment in the mental health system is making a difference more...

The National Mental Health Information Strategy
Key impacts for NGOs from the strategy and its associated implementation document are summarised more...

Reference to Information Requirements in other Ministry of Health documents:

Te Tahuhu (The Mental Health and Addiction Action Plan 2006-2015) aims to assist government and NGO service providers to work more closely together, to jointly develop solutions to problems and work towards improving outcomes for people with mental health and addiction problems.

Te Kokiri (The Implementation plan of Te Tahuhu) the Leading Challenge of Transparency and Trust identifies:

  • Increasing the availability of information and information systems to underpin service development, which support decision-making and improve services for people
  • Creating an environment that enables DHBs to demonstrate that their investment in mental health and/or addiction deliver value for money, are result focused and have regard to service impacts on people who are severely affected by mental illness and addiction.
  • Creating an environment where mental health workers and service users can readily use information to support and enhance recovery.

Tauawhitia te Wero - Embracing the Challenge: National mental health and addiction workforce development plan 2006 - 2009

  • To ensure that robust and uniformly defined data is collected across the whole of the mental health and addiction workforce to allow better workforce development planning, service quality improvement and forecasting.