Publication, Part of Mental Health Services Monthly Statistics
Mental Health Services Monthly Statistics, Performance July 2025
Official statistics
Issue with MHS148 (Referrals with a presenting complaint)
Please note, NHS England is aware of an issue with metric MH148 (Number of open referrals with a Presenting Complaint recorded at the end of the reporting period). The issue means that data is estimated to be 25-30% higher than the true value. Given this data is provided to support data quality and provide context, no action is being taken to correct these figures for 24-25. Data for 25-26 will be corrected in due course with the publication of the end of year files.
30 June 2026 12:00 PM
Issue with EIP68 (EIP Caseload)
Please note, an issue has been uncovered regarding EIP68 (EIP Caseload (Number of Referrals open to EIP services with at least one attended contact at the end of the reporting period). The aggregation of this metric meant that some referrals were counted more than once. For data for March 2025, the scale of the issue was an overcount of around 23%. Data will not be retrospectively updated for 2025-26 and previous. Data for July 2026 onwards will be corrected with data for April to June 2026 being updated when the end of year runs for 2026-27 occur. As a result of this, users should exercise caution when using this metric.
27 August 2026 11:00 AM
Summary
This publication provides the timeliest picture available of people using NHS funded secondary mental health, learning disabilities and autism services in England, excluding those who are solely in contact with Talking Therapies. This information will be of use to people needing access to information quickly for operational decision making and other purposes. More detailed information on the quality and completeness of these statistics is available in the Data Quality section, as well as within the Data Coverage and Data Quality VODIM and Integrity files available under 'Resources'.
Highlights
Additions to the publication
As part of this July release, a number of new metrics and breakdowns have been added to the publication. These broadly include:
- Additional Mental Health Act reporting. This reporting includes additional metrics and breakdowns. As part of the MHA annual publication (released on 18 September 2025), an enhanced dashboard will be released which will include monthly data.
- Reporting using the LD and Autism status fields. Reporting uses these fields for 4 key metrics (People in contact with services, Contacts, New Referrals and people with an open hospital spell), OAPs and MHA reporting. Caution should be taken when interpreting this data initially given the field was only introduced as part of version 6 of the dataset in April 2024 and has not previously been used until now.
- Additional metrics relating to CYP Access. This includes the addition of crude and standardised rates and comparisons between groups for ethnicity and deprivation to support health inequalities reporting at Region and ICB level.
- Minor amendments to some of the VODIM metrics. These changes have been made to better reflect guidance and reporting practices. Only Experimental DQMI scores maybe impacted by this change.
Full details of the new metrics and the breakdowns included can be found in the Metadata file.
Release of 'End of Year Final' 2025-26 data
'End of Year Final' versions of the main monthly csv files for each month between April 2025 and March 2026, collected under MHSDS version 6, which reflect revised 2025-26 Multiple Submission Window Model submissions that occurred after 'Performance' monthly data had already been published are now available.
The following files will be re-issued using end-of-year 'final' data
- Monthly 'Main' csv
- Monthly 'Restrictive Interventions' csv
- Monthly 'Out of Area Placements' csv
- Monthly 'Mental Health Services Measures to support the Adult Social Care Outcome Framework' csv
- Monthly 'Referral Spells' csv
- Monthly 'Adult Social Care Outcome Framework' csv
- Monthly 'Time series' csv
- Monthly 'Time Series for Out of Area Placements' csv
The 25/26 data in the monthly time-series file to be issued for the July-25 reporting period will be based on final, end-of-year data.
Please refer to the relevant monthly publication pages available from the Mental Health Services Monthly Statistics series page for further details and to access the 'End of Year Final' 2025-26 data.
Implementation of referral spells using MHSDS data
As part of the September 2024 Performance publication in the Mental Health Services Monthly Statistics publication series, a new set of metrics will be introduced which utilise a new methodology which groups sets of individual referrals into a referral spell. Using this methodology, a spell is defined as starting at the point the first referral that is in scope is received by a provider. From this point, other referrals can form part of a referral spell where they are open concurrently or where the next referral opens within 5 days of the previous referral ending. A spell is closed when the last referral is recorded as closed (using the service discharge date).
Only referrals which fall within the inclusion and exclusion criteria will make up the referral spell. Where a person has other open referrals within the same provider that are not in scope for either of the two pathways, these referrals will not be included in the spell.
Data which utilises the referral spell methodology will be published in a separate CSV file in the Mental Health Monthly Statistics publication and also will be denoted by Metric IDs that begin with “MRS”.
Please note that April, May and June 2024 referral spell data has been published on the respective publication pages.
Full details can be found in the methodological change notice here
Changing the submission windows for the Mental Health Services Data
This July 2025 performance publication contains all data relating to the reporting period in it, with the exception of restraints data. This is because these reports are still being published in the second month following the activity. Providers have indicated that there is often some delay until the restraints data is available for them to submit. As a result, the timeliness with which NHS England receives restraints data does not currently support 'first cut' reporting, although it may do in the future should timeliness improve.
Performance reporting for restraints was added to this page for July 2025.
Mental Health publications consultation
NHS England are consulting on the future of Mental Health reporting. This consultation covers the Mental Health Services Monthly Statistics, the Mental Health Bulletin and the Mental Health Act, Annual Figures publications.
The consultation is designed to help make decisions about future reporting and to ensure that the data provided is as useful as possible.
If you would like to discuss your views in more detail with us, please email [email protected] including "Mental Health Publications consultation" in the subject.
Access the code used to create this report
The code used to create the outputs for this report is available on our NHS Digital GitHub webpage.
Key Facts
Key Facts Based on 'End of Year Final' data
- At the end of July, there were 2.16 million people were in contact with mental health services, at the end of July; the majority of these (1.47 million) were in contact with adult mental health services.
- There were 505,059 people had an open referral with children and young people’s mental health services, and 296,878 people has an open referral with learning disabilities and autism services.
- 516,718 new referrals were received into services during July, and 2.58 million care contacts were attended.
- 23,714 people were subject to the Mental Health Act at the end of July, including 16,620 people detained in hospital.
Key Facts Based on 'Performance' data (superseded by 'End of Year Final' statistics)
- At the end of July, there were 2.15 million people in contact with services; the majority of these (1.45 million) were in adult mental health services.
- There were 501,280 people in contact with children and young people’s mental health services and 300,387 in learning disabilities and autism services.
- 499,834 new referrals were received into services during July, and 2.54 million care contacts were attended.
- 23,315 people were subject to the Mental Health Act at the end of July, including 16,750 people detained in hospital.
This is the fourth monthly release using data collected under MHSDS version 6. Please refer to the July 2025 publication for an outline of the changes to the dataset introduced by the move to MHSDS version 6. Full details of the changes to the dataset are available in the Technical Output Specification and the updated constructions for all measures in this publication are available in the metadata file.
Resources
Last edited: 28 August 2026 10:16 am