National Psychiatric Inpatient Reporting System (NPIRS)
Health Research Board (HRB)- National Health Information Systems (NHIS).
Established in 1963, arising from the recommendations of the report of the Commission of Enquiry on Mental Illness (Department of Health, 1966). It has been maintained by the Medico-Social Research Board (MSRB) and subsequently, the Health Research Board (HRB), since 1971.
The NPIRS is a psychiatric inpatient database which provides detailed information on all admissions to and discharges from in-patient psychiatric services in Ireland for service planning and delivery, the Department of Health, the HSE, clinicians, service user advocacy groups and research/academics through the quarterly production of KPI reports, the annual report, regional bulletins and requests for data/research collaboration.
Community mental health settings are not included in coverage.
All centres approved under the Mental Health Act 2001 including private psychiatric hospitals and child and adolescent units are included.
Data collection commenced in 1963 with a census of all in-patients and annual data has been published since 1965 to the present.
The database records all admissions to, discharges from and deaths in Irish psychiatric units and hospitals on the register of approved centres under the Mental Health Act 2001. The annual reports produced from the database play a key role in the planning of service delivery. National and regional bulletins capturing data for the HSE areas, along with an in-patient census carried out every three years, are also produced from the database. The database also provides much of the data on Performance Indicators (PIs) for the mental health services which are used to monitor targets in certain keys areas of the services.
Department of Health, HSE, Mental Health Commission, service user advocacy groups, clinicians, academics/researchers.
Data collected includes demographic and clinical information relating to all admissions, discharges and deaths for Irish psychiatric units and hospitals.
Demographic information includes gender; age; marital status; address and socio-economic group.
Clinical information includes: ICD 10 admission and discharge diagnoses. Up to four admission and discharge diagnoses can be recorded from 2021.
Other information includes: legal status on admission and reason for discharge; date of admission and discharge and where a patient is discharged to are also collected.
A data dictionary is in place however this is not available online.
Most hospitals use their own unique number/identifier for patients. IHI field is included on the system to facilitate the collection of this field but it is not currently collected. PPSN is not collected.
Address from which admitted (not including first line address), gender, ethnicity, occupation, socio economic group and country of birth are all included in the database and are collected/completed by NPIRS contacts in each hospital/unit.
Data are collected by each hospital/approved centre upon admission/discharge of a patient and returned to the NPIRS team in the National Health Information Systems of the HRB. Data are returned electronically on a quarterly basis by acute psychiatric hospitals/units and yearly by non-acute psychiatric hospitals/units.
The Clinical coding scheme is the WHO International Classification of Diseases (ICD 10).
Approximately 17,000 admissions and 17,000 discharges are recorded on average annually.
Data are published annually in the report ‘Activities of Irish Psychiatric Units and Hospitals’ while the inpatient census report is published every three years. PI data are currently produced for the HSE every quarter.
Annual reports plus CHO bulletins are published and available to download on the HRB website. In addition, quarterly Performance Indicator (PI) reports for each CHO area are produced for the HSE on selected mental health indicators. These are only available to individuals within each CHO area. A Hospital Type and National PI report are also produced quarterly and are made available to HSE management teams, Department of Health teams and senior clinicians/ECDs. Annual data are available to download in pdf or excel format on the HRB website and further data are also available on request subject to certain terms and conditions. Data are also available on the Public Health Information System and interactive tables are available at www.cso.ie.
Yes.
Futher information on the NPIRS database is available at www.hrb.ie