Significant advances have been made over the past decade in the development of indicators for the Australian health sector, focusing mainly in the field of acute hospital care.

Ongoing development of performance measures is occurring on multiple fronts, as part of Australian Government and State and Territory initiatives.

Thirteen key performance indicators for public mental health services have been identified across six domains of the national framework.

• 28 day readmission rate
• National Service Standards compliance
• Average length of acute inpatient stay
• Cost per acute inpatient episode
• Treatment days per three month community care period
• Cost per three month community care period
• Population under care
• Local access to inpatient care
• New client index
• Comparative area resources
• Pre-admission community assessment
• Post-discharge community care
• Outcomes readiness

The initial basic technical specifications for the construction of these indicators were published in the document:

Key Performance Indicators for Australian Public Mental Health Services

Work is currently occurring through the National Mental Health Performance Subcommittee to further refine these indicators and develop more indicators across the remaining domains. The next priority for indicator development is the safety domain of the framework.

Based on initial learnings from the National Mental Health Benchmarking Project and advice from a range of stakeholders a number of minor modifications have been made to the technical specifications of some of the KPIs. The modifications to definitions, numerators and denominators are outlined in the document below.

Revised National MH KPI Definitions_20070504