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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.

Strategic Data Pty Ltd 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 sympa@lists.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

Update to the PMHC MDS - 4/10/2019

PMHC MDS Update v0.32.3

We are pleased to announce that PMHC MDS Update v0.32.3 was released on October 4, 2019.

The following reports have been updated to reflect changes to the specifications:

  • A9 now uses the same (new) criteria for baseline episode inclusion as Out-1, Out-2 and Out-3

The following features have been implemented in the upload interface:

  • The upload interface will now allow headspace head office to upload data to headspace provider organisations across all PHNs. This has been implemented using a feature that is being called ‘Provider Organisation Groups’ or POGs. In the current implementation, users at PHNs will not be able to view data in the headspace POG via the data entry interface or reports. In a future enhancement aggregated headspace data will be available to PHNs via reports

The following bugfixes have been implemented in the data entry interface:

  • Collection Occasion scores and descriptions are now laid out consistently across different collection occasion types
  • All forms now contain a description that an asterisk against a field means that the field is mandatory
  • Fixed a bug where the error message ‘Episode - End Date should be after Episode - Referral Date’ was not being detected until after the Episode form had been submitted

The following bugfixes have been implemented in the upload interface:

  • Fixed an error message ‘Organisations: Invalid organisation_start_date in row …’ when a Organisations file or worksheet has not been uploaded
  • Fixed a bug where worksheet names with leading or trailing spaces or where names of worksheets started with a lowercase letter were not being identified
  • Fixed a bug where metadata files specifying version 1 were not returning a sensible error message

The user guide has been updated to reflect these updates. It is available at https://docs.pmhc-mds.com/projects/user-documentation/en/latest/.

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