Irish Psychiatric Units and Hospitals Census
National Health Information Systems Unit at the Health Research Board (HRB).
1963
The census database is a psychiatric inpatient database which captures the number of psychiatric patient’s resident on a certain date for the planning and future development of mental health services and to allow for the prediction of possible future bed and hospital requirements at both national and local levels by service planners, HSE management teams and clinicians.
Coverage is limited to residents in MHC approved centres. Community provision is out of scope.
All psychiatric units and hospitals operating under the provisions of the Mental Health Act 2001 and on the register of approved centres under the Mental Health Act.
Data has been collected at various census intervals since 1963.
The database records data on all residents (on 31 March of the census year in question) of psychiatric inpatient facilities on the register of approved centres under the Mental Health Act 2001.
The key users are service planners, Department of Health, HSE, Mental Health Commission, clinicians, academics/researchers.
Includes: socio-demographic; clinical and diagnostic information on all residents of psychiatric inpatient services on census night. Socio-demographic details include gender; age, marital status; address, occupation and socio-economic group.
Clinical and diagnostic information include: legal status on census night; primary and secondary diagnosis. Date of present admission is also recorded.
A data dictionary is available but is not available online.
Most hospitals use unique patient identifiers but PPSN is not used. The IHI field is included but is currently not collected.
Address from which admitted (not including first line address), gender, ethnicity, occupation, socio economic group, country of birth are all included in the database and are collected/completed by NPIRS contacts in each hospital/unit.
Data for the census are collected by each hospital/centre for each inpatient resident on 31 March and returned electronically to the HRB.
Data is currently collected every three years and this timeframe is reviewed according to demands for increased or decreased frequency for census data.
The Clinical coding scheme is the WHO International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10).
In the last Census in 2019 there were 2,308 records.
Census data are returned by all hospitals/units operating under the provisions of the Mental Health Act 2001 to the HRB. Frequency of publications depends on when the census was carried out; the first census report was 1963. The next census took place in 1971 and census data were published every 10 years thereafter until 2001. The next census in 2006 took place after a period of five years. From 2010 the census has taken place every three years resources permitting. The most recent census was 2019.
The census report for each census year and a census bulletin are available with recent reports available on the HRB website along with tables for download. Data is available on request. Data is also available on the PHIS (Department of Health).
No.
Database administrators in the HRB manually clean and check each individual data file received from hospitals. Certain fields are coded manually, e.g. socio-economic group. Prior to the file being uploaded to the database it is validated by the database programme and errors are identified. Once data is corrected and uploaded, it is again validated prior to the forwarding of the census status report to each hospital. Data is again validated prior to the production of the census report. Sign offs are required from all units and hospitals.