London (The Brussels Morning Newspaper) – Thousands of patients are being overlooked from official health statistics because they are not visited by hospitals or GPs, according to a groundbreaking analysis of ambulance data in England.
What Does the New Study Reveal About Mental Health Data?
More than a third of people who drove calls regarded by Yorkshire Ambulance Service (YAS) last year – 288,000 of approximately 800,000 – did not go to the clinic. Many of these patients had mental health problems. Some people were ministered to by ambulance staff at the scene, or later visited a GP or took themselves to A&E. But circumstances that are not commonly ministered in hospital, such as mental health issues, substance abuse or self-harm, are likely to be dramatically undercounted, according to the study by YAS and the Association of Ambulance Chief Executives (AACE).
Why Are Many Patients Overlooked in Official Health Statistics?
NHS figures indicate that there were 870 hospital entries yet YAS acquired about 3,300 calls. Verity Bellamy, senior public health analyst at YAS, stated: “This suggests we’re missing almost three-quarters of those young people by just using hospital data.” The highest number of mental fitness calls was from girls and young women aged between 15 and 24 – nearly 13% of 50,000 calls.
Bellamy stated it might be the right thing for those young people not to be then welcomed to the hospital. “But if we want to measure the prevalence of mental health needs in young people, we need to think about using ambulance data [as well as] hospital data.”
She conducted the study, presented at the NHS ConfedExpo in June, with YAS associate Ruth Crabtree, who is also the AACE’s national leader for public health, and they intend to do an England-wide analysis of ambulance data. Crabtree expressed it was the first time an ambulance assistant had systematically examined its data in this way. “As a sector, we tend to measure implementation and demand, rather than this kind of more upstream way of looking at things,” she expressed.
“So it’s very unusual that Verity has come in and seen something that shocked her and that is quite different to what we’ve seen before.”
How Are Young People and Vulnerable Groups Affected by Health Data Gaps?
Dr Steven Dykes, YAS deputy medical director, stated that ambulances increasingly delivered care on the scene to people who did not want to go to the clinic, such as homeless people, refugees and older, more frail people. “One of the key items for us was that the ambulance rate for those in the most constrained areas is double that of the least deprived,” he stated. “There’s a greater portion that [ambulance crews] are working at home and when you see that in the data, it’s quite shocking”.
The analysis revealed that 55% of all calls relating to mental health were for under-40s, with almost a quarter for under-25s. People in the most impoverished fifth of society were five times more likely to contact an ambulance for a mental health concern.
People in the most restrained areas also made up 40% of the 72,000 calls for breathing problems. “We understand why that might be. We have much more elevated smoking rates in the most deprived groups. We have people with more industrial employment and poor-quality housing. But we did see a matching pattern for young people as well, which we were quite surprised about. That doesn’t include smoking and doesn’t include longstanding illness,” Bellamy declared.
How Is the Dentistry Crisis Impacting Health Statistics and Services?
The analysis also showed the knock-on impact of the dentistry crisis. YAS acquired more than 5,000 calls for toothache in under-10s, of which 64% were from the most restrained group, corresponding with 4% from the slightly deprived.