Referrals received by mental health and addiction teams in New Zealand from community support services

Referral: A referral may take several forms, most notably:
(a) a request for management of a problem or provision of a service (eg, a request for an investigation, intervention or treatment)
(b) notification of a problem with the hope, expectation or imposition of its management.
The common factor in all referrals is a communication whose intent is the transfer of care/support, in part or in whole.

A person can have more than one referral open at once and therefore may be counted against each referral source.

Mental health: A state of wellbeing in which the individual realises his or her own abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to his or her community (World Health Organization 2012).
Addiction, drug or alcohol: Repeated use of a psychoactive substance or substances, to the extent that the user is periodically or chronically intoxicated, shows a compulsion to take the preferred substance (or substances), has great difficulty in voluntarily ceasing or modifying substance use, and exhibits determination to obtain psychoactive substances by almost any means. Also known as alcohol and drug dependence (World Health Organization 2012).
People seen: Users of mental health and addiction services. The person does not need to be physically present to be counted for example telephone contact with a clinician. People seen in more than one financial year are counted in each relevant year.
Ethnic group: In order to report a single ethnicity for each person, responses have been prioritised according to a list published by Stats NZ.

In 2017/18 NGO data was incomplete however the number of NGOs reporting data to the Ministry of Health has been increasing over time.

https://www.health.govt.nz/publication/guide-primhd-activity-collection-and-use

Some organisations had breaks in reporting and/or incomplete data in PRIMHD in the 2019/20 year. A few NGOs started and/or stopped reporting during 2019/20 so not all organisations have data for the whole time period. Additionally, reporting for some organisations was affected due to level 4 lockdown for COVID-19, affecting records particularly for the period of April and May 2020.

It is known that some of Hawke's Bay District Health Board's PRIMHD data is over-reported (duplicated) for the 2019/20 year, so figures may be high in these data tables. For this reason please use Hawke's Bay data with caution. Nelson Marlborough DHB moved to a new patient management system in early 2018. This led to some changes in data reporting patterns in 2019/20. For this reason please use Nelson Marlborough data with caution.

In 2008, DHBs began reporting to PRIMHD. In addition, from this date an increasing number of NGOs began reporting to the PRIMHD database. Shifts or patterns in the data after 2008 may reflect the gradual adaptation of non-governmental organisations into the PRIMHD collection in addition to, or instead of, any trend in mental health and addiction service use or outcomes. This point is illustrated by the artificial trend within the chart below in which the crude rate of clients seen by NGOs in 2017/18 was nine times that reported in 2008/09. Although NGO data is still incomplete, the Ministry of Health considers it complete enough for comparison across time from 1 July 2012 onwards.

Mental health and addiction services for older people are funded as mental health and addiction services in the Northern and Midland regions. In the Southern and Central regions they are funded as disability support services. PRIMHD mainly captures mental health and addiction services, and occasionally captures data on disability support services. This means data on health care users aged over 65 (including psychogeriatric services) is incomplete.

This dataset does not have information on:
- the provision of primary mental health care, such as care provided by general practitioners
- secondary mental health services funded by other government departments e.g. funded by the Ministry of Social Development
- problem gambling
- people with a mental illness who do not access services. -

There was significant change made to the coding of team types as part of the HISO review of the PRIMHD Codeset. This change was made on 1/7/2014 to all data in PRIMHD from 1/7/2008 onwards. Additionally the Ministry of Health has recently undertaken a review of all standard definitions used in our PRIMHD publications and reports. This has resulted in a slight change to some of the tables in this spreadsheet.

This means that data extracted before 1/7/2014, held in previous publications in this series, should not be compared to data tables containing team type variables. Furthermore caution should be used when comparing data extracted before 1/7/2014 to any of the other tables.

At URL provided, select 'Mental Health and Addiction: Service use 2019/20 (xlsx, 405 KB)' from the right hand column.

This dataset includes information on mental health and addiction services (care) provided by secondary organisations funded by the Ministry of Health. Specifically, it covers demographic and geographic information, client referral pathways, the types of services provided, the outcome of the services and legal status and diagnosis information.

The information was sourced from the Programme for the Integration of Mental Health Data (PRIMHD pronounced ‘primed’). The data was collected by district health boards (DHBs) and non-governmental organisations (NGOs).