This briefing is produced jointly by the NHS Confederation’s Mental Health Network and Primary Care Trust Network, the Audit Commission, and the National Mental Health Development Unit. It provides a guide to support local mental health communities to gain a better understanding of their local acute care pathway for adult mental health and, where necessary, to help come up with solutions that provide better value for money.
It focuses on how organisations can use benchmarked data on bed usage, with additional local data where appropriate, to improve the efficiency of the acute care pathway. It has been designed for use in any mental health system, wherever they are on the performance scale and whatever their service configuration and their demographic and geographical circumstances.