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About the PMHC-MDS

Funding by the Australian Government Department of Health has been provided to Primary Health Networks (PHNs) through a Primary Mental Health Care flexible funding pool to support commissioning of mental health and suicide prevention services in six key service delivery areas:

  • low intensity psychological interventions for people with, or at risk of, mild mental illness;
  • psychological therapies delivered by mental health professionals to under serviced groups;
  • early intervention services for children and young people with, or at risk of mental illness;
  • services for people with severe and complex mental illness who are being managed in a primary care setting;
  • enhanced Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander mental health services; and
  • a regional approach to suicide prevention activities with a focus on improved follow-up for people who have attempted suicide or are at high risk of suicide.

The Primary Mental Health Care Minimum Data Set (PMHC MDS) will provide the basis for PHNs and the Department of Health to monitor and report on the quantity and quality of service delivery, and to inform future improvements in the planning and funding of primary mental health care services funded by the Australian Government.

The data reported by PHNs through the PMHC MDS will form the basis for production of key performance indicators used to monitor services delivered across the 31 PHN regions covered by PHNs.

Logicly has been contracted by the Department of Health to manage the PMHC MDS on its behalf.

A specification of the data items to be collected in the PMHC MDS is available.

If you would like to be notified about updates to this specification or announcements about the rollout of the PMHC MDS please subscribe to the PMHC MDS mailing list by sending an email to support@pmhc-mds.com with the subject “subscribe news@lists.pmhc-mds.com”. This is not a general discussion list. Only moderated users can send messages to this list.

Information about how to get started on the PMHC MDS is available and will be regularly updated.

Announcements

Latest

FOR ACTION: Tags in the PMHC MDS

The below circular was sent to PHN CEOs on Friday 20 February 2025.

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Dear PHN CEOs,

The Department of Health and Aged Care is writing to you to request that all PHNs and/or their Provider Organisations (POs) conduct a review of the tags they use in the Primary Mental Health Care Minimum Data Set (PMHC MDS) to ensure they have been entered correctly.

For your action:

  • Ensure relevant staff receive and review the information provided in this circular regarding review of PMHC MDS tags by 31 March 2025.
  • Amend any tags that have been entered incorrectly in the PMHC MDS by 30 June 2025.
  • Ensure all tags, historically and new, are entered in accordance with the guidance provided in this circular.

For any questions regarding this information please contact mentalhealthdata@health.gov.au.

Kind regards,

Mental Health Data

PHN CEO Circular – February 2025

Tags in the PMHC MDS

Overview

The Department of Health and Aged Care (the department) is writing to you to request that all PHNs and/or their Provider Organisations (POs) conduct a review of the tags they use in the Primary Mental Health Care Minimum Data Set (PMHC MDS) to ensure they have been entered correctly.

To support the information in this circular, PHNs are asked to:

  • Ensure relevant staff receive and review the information provided in this circular regarding review of PMHC MDS tags by 31 March 2025.
  • Amend any tags that have been entered incorrectly in the PMHC MDS by 30 June 2025.
  • Ensure all tags, historically and new, are entered in accordance with the guidance provided in this circular.

For any questions regarding this information please contact mentalhealthdata@health.gov.au.

Background

Some issues have been identified in relation to the tag field in the PMHC MDS. There are two types of tags available to users in the PMHC MDS; system tags that start with “!” and user tags that do not start with “!”. System tags beginning with an exclamation mark (!) are reserved for use by the department only.

System tags have been used to implement extension data specifications such as Wayback (!wayback) and headspace (!headspace). They have also been used to record data where extra partitioning of data was needed for reporting purposes. An example of this was for the bushfire response in 2020. A !br20 tag was implemented to track episodes where one or more services were funded through the bushfire response. The current list of reserved system tags is available at https://docs.pmhc-mds.com/projects/data-specification/en/v4/reserved-tags.html.

User tags can be used by PHNs/POs to tag records in order to partition data to accommodate local requirements as desired.

Action required

PHNs and their POs are asked to review and audit their tags in the PMHC MDS to ensure they have been entered correctly (e.g., no missing commas between tags). Of particular note, multiple tags can be added to a record by separating them with commas. Some of the existing tags may have been meant to have been multiple tags, but they have not been comma separated, so instead one long tag has been added. For example a record may have a tag ‘!covid19 this is an example !br20’ whereas the intention was to have the three tags:

  • !covid19
  • this is an example
  • !br20

Tags can contain lower case letters (or will get lowercased), numbers, dashes, spaces, and “!”. Leading and trailing spaces will be stripped.

As of 1 May 2025 the PMHC MDS will only accept system tags that are in the reserved list.

For technical support, please contact Logicly at support@pmhc-mds.com.

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