Mental health data cubes

Mental health data cubes contain detailed information from several mental-health related National Minimum Datasets (NMDSs) administered by the AIHW.

National Minimum Datasets

The Admitted Patient Mental Health Care NMDS includes data on patients admitted to hospital who receive specialised psychiatric care, i.e. who are in a public psychiatric hospital or a psychiatric unit of an acute care hospital or who had a mental health-related principal diagnosis (for definitions, see AIHW publication Mental health services in Australia–key concepts on Admitted Patient mental health-related care). The variables included in the Admitted Patient data cubes are year of collection, sex, age group, same day separation flag, mental health legal status, type of separation, hospital type and principal diagnosis. The Admitted Patient data cubes present information on numbers of psychiatric care days, separations and patient days. The first Admitted Patients data cube contains information on all mental health-related hospital separations for recent years. The second Admitted Patients cube contains information on only those hospital separations which involved specialised psychiatric care.

The Community Mental Health Care NMDS includes data on client contacts with government-operated specialised community mental health care services and hospital-based ambulatory care services, such as outpatient and day clinics. The variables included in the Community Mental Health Care contacts data cube are year of collection, sex, age group, mental health legal status and principal diagnosis. The Community Mental Health Care contacts data cube presents information on numbers of contacts for recent years.

The Residential Mental Health Care NMDS includes data on client episodes in government-operated residential mental health care services. The variables included in the Residential Mental Health Care episodes data cube are year of collection, sex, age group, mental health legal status and principal diagnosis. The Residential Mental Health Care data cube presents information only on numbers of residential care episodes.

What is a data cube? 

A data cube is a multidimensional representation of data which provides flexible retrieval and drill down facilities. To learn more about the cubes, and how to manipulate them, download the user reference (271KB DOC) or use the help facility available on the cube viewing page.

How do I export data from cubes?

You can export data from a cube to a file for use in other applications such as Microsoft Excel or a web browser. Once you have the required data visible in the data cube, choose File/Export from the menu bar or click the Export button The zip file for export contains both xls and html versions of the visible data.

Data sources

The source of data for the Admitted Patient data cubes is the AIHW National Hospital Morbidity Database. The source of data for the Community Mental Health Care contacts data cube is the National Community Mental Health Care Database as specified by the Community Mental Health Care NMDS. The source of data for the Residential Mental Health Care episodes data cube is the National Residential Mental Health Care Database as specified by the Residential Mental Health Care NMDS.

Definitions

Definitions that are used in the data presented are from the National Health Data Dictionary .