Recording of severe mental illness in general hospitals

People with mental health problems have worse physical health compared to those without. General hospital admissions are therefore common but these admissions are often long and complex and the person can experience adverse outcomes. The ability to provide continuity of care in hospital for people with mental illness, and adapt physical care to account for their mental health problems, relies on recognising and accurately recording the mental illness. However we currently have little information on how well mental health problems are recognised. In this project, we propose to use routinely collected clinical data from the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust ‘CRIS’ database to identify people with severe mental health problems and then use their linked NHS general hospital records to examine whether the condition was correctly recorded during hospital admissions.