Northern Health and Social Care Trust

Government Agency (Health and Adult Social Care)

Kevin Dyer

E050

The Psychological Therapies Service (PTS) provides a wide range of therapies for adults with moderate/severe mental health difficulties within a stepped-care framework. To date, analyses on access, effectiveness, and acceptability data collected by PTS has allowed many aspects of service provision to be evaluated and actual improvements to clinical practice to be made. Data collected by mental (e.g. PTS) and physical health services (e.g. hospitals) are typically separated, limiting the opportunity for patterns between these two factors to be uncovered in order to inform therapeutic practice. Linking therapy service data with wider health care data would allow therapy impact to be monitored over a wider range of outcomes and on a longer term basis without increasing respondent burden. The proposed project will link approx. 7000 PTS client outcome records (used the service since 2009) to hospital admissions and prescriptions data. Data linkage methodology provides the most feasible method of incorporating such data into the PTS outcomes database. Other methods such as self-report would be unworkable for a variety of reasons (e.g. service user burden; time demands; self-report biases). Honest Broker Service will provide us with data for all individuals registered with a GP in Northern Health and Social Care trust as of January 2010. The research team will then select matched case control data, using deprivation, gender and age as match variables. This linkage project will tell us, for PTS clients and case controls, the prevalence of: hospital admissions due to mental/physical health conditions; and prescriptions for mental-health conditions. Further the impact of PTS on health conditions/prescriptions use will be examined and factors influencing the effectiveness of PTS therapy will be explored.

Data collected by mental and physical health services are typically separated, limiting the opportunity for patterns between these two factors to be uncovered in order to inform therapeutic practice. An opportunity now exists to link the PTS outcomes database to other healthcare data and make a significant contribution to the research literature by exploring how mental health is linked with other aspects of client’s lives including physical health, hospital usage and prescription patterns. (Chief Medical Officer, 2013; De Hert et al., 2009; Nielsen, Uggerby, Jensen & McGrath, 2013; Walker et al., 2015). Through the proposed research it will also be possible to make evidence based recommendations for improving clinical practice within PTS and other comparable therapeutic services to ensure that clients are receiving optimum care.

04/10/2019

TRE