Inpatient mental health: a digital desert
Summary
In October, the Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch will tweak its name, become independent from NHS England and the UK government, and gain new powers to strengthen investigations. With the announcement of the change in status, Health Secretary, Steven Barclay, reported it would be leading an investigation into inpatient mental health. This follows swiftly on the heels of the Strathdee rapid review into data on mental health inpatient settings, which itself was launched in response to well-documented failures in these settings. The aim of this new investigation into mental health is simple: to improve safety.
In this blog, Karen West, Head of Transformation (Mental health) at Oxehealth, and Professor Dan Joyce from the University of Liverpool, discuss the importance of data in patient safety improvement and explain why inpatient mental health data is so difficult to collect and what can be done to improve this.
