Making the Most of those Mountains of Data: A Case Study in an Adult Mental Health Service
| Date | 01 September 2004 |
| Pages | 13-16 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/13619322200400025 |
| Published date | 01 September 2004 |
| Author | Kim Goddard,Rachel Perkins |
| Subject Matter | Health & social care |
Making the Most of those
Mountains of Data: A Case Study
in an Adult Mental Health Service
Kim Goddard
Assistant Director Governance
South West London & St George’s Mental
Health NHS Trust
Rachel Perkins
Clinical Director Adult Mental Health
Services
South West London & St George’s Mental
Health NHS Trust
Case Study
nformation is something that mental
health services are typically not very good at. The
Commission for Health Improvement (CHI), in their
summary of clinical governance reviews of mental
health trusts (CHI, 2003), said that the systems for
collecting data and the use made of this data once
collected, were almost universally poor. Out of 17
reviews, 12 trusts scored 1, indicating little or no
progress at strategic and planning or at operational
level. Bevan and Bawden (2001) had already
identified in CHI’s first year of operation that good
use of information underpins all other clinical
governance initiatives and that therefore the failure
to use information was a significant barrier to service
improvement. The Audit Commission (2004) made
similar comments and recommended that
improvement in the quality and use of data be a key
priority of strategic health authorities’ performance
management of trusts.
At a local level, new commissioning
arrangements, as well as national reporting
requirements, have significantly increased the
importance of information for services. If
commissioners cannot see what they are getting for
their money, they become increasingly reluctant to
provide the resources we need to do our work. If we
are unable to provide data relating to national targets
then we lose out on our star ratings. The ever-
expanding body of regulatory bodies – Risk Pooling
Scheme for Trusts, Clinical Negligence Scheme for
Trusts, Health and Safety Executive inspections,
IControls Assurance, Social Services Inspectorate
reviews, Local Authority Scrutiny Committees –
require their pound of flesh. Without information
about what we are doing we quite simply fail.
The purpose of this paper is to describe what we
have done in adult mental health services within
South West London and St George’s Mental Health
Trust to try to address some of these issues.
The problem
On the one hand, we faced ever-increasing demands
for information about performance, and on the other
poor and inaccurate data, and an ever-increasing
resistance to providing it on the part of clinicians.
On the demand side there were the repeated
complaints from commissioners and the myriad
inspection bodies about our failure to produce
accurate information about what we were doing,
which were combined with demands to agree a set of
key performance indicators against which our
services would be judged. Then there was an
increasing number of requests for information by
user and carer groups and representatives. These
progressively became more precise and sophisticated:
■‘Are you really looking at money and housing
in care plans?’
■‘How much “overmedication” (polypharmacy,
dosages above BNF limits) is there in the
trust?’
The Mental Health Review Volume 9 Issue 3 September 2004 ©Pavilion Publishing (Brighton) 2004 13
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