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This page is an AI-assisted Turkish summary of the study presented at the 26th World Congress of Psychiatry. The study belongs to the presenting authors; please refer to the original source when citing it.

SO471

What are the challenges to linking mental health data across levels of care in the United Kingdom?

WHAT ARE THE CHALLENGES OF LINKING MENTAL HEALTH–RELATED DATA ACROSS CARE SETTINGS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM?

Linking mental health data across levels of care in the United Kingdom is feasible but constrained by governance, technical and structural barriers.

The study aims to examine the challenges to linking mental health-related data across national and regional datasets in the United Kingdom. As noted in the poster, most people with common mental disorders are managed in primary care through general practice and NHS Talking Therapies (NHS-TT), which provides evidence-based psychological treatments. However, approximately 50% of patients do not recover following NHS-TT, and their subsequent care pathways are not adequately characterised. The design is an exploratory scoping study examining, at the national level, the MODIFY linked dataset (NHS-TT, the Mental Health Services Data Set and mortality records, as well as hospital admission, outpatient and emergency department statistics) and, at the regional level, general practice, NHS-TT, secondary and tertiary care data held in the South West, North West and South London Secure Data Environments (SDEs). The findings group the barriers into three domains: technical, governance and structural. In the technical domain, differences between Read/SNOMED CT coding in primary care and ICD-10 coding in secondary care pose a major harmonisation challenge, while gaps in regional data limit reliable and consistent linkage. In the governance domain, approval processes involving multiple organisations delay data access, and confidentiality restrictions on general practice records limit their integration with NHS-TT and secondary care data. In the structural domain, fragmentation across services makes it difficult to reconstruct patient pathways. The authors propose privacy-preserving linkage methods and stronger collaboration across primary care, NHS-TT, secondary care and secure data environments as solutions, emphasising that overcoming these barriers is essential to monitoring and supporting patients with mental disorders.

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