Mental Health Services Data Sets Interventions
The Mental Health Services Data Set (MHSDS) provides consistent, patient-level information for people accessing mental health services. To improve data quality and clinical consistency, NHS England commissioned PRSB to develop SNOMED CT reference sets for community mental health teams. The first version was published in 2023, and this 2025 update builds on that work.
The reference sets cover non-urgent pathways for children, young people and adults, including therapeutic interventions, care planning, and one-off sessions. They support routine MHSDS submissions and waiting time reporting, without replacing broader clinical documentation.
The 2025 update expands and maintains these sets, adding new interventions for emerging roles, autism assessments, older adult care, and digitally enabled therapies. Clear definitions and use cases help teams record data consistently and accurately, while updates remain aligned with national guidance.
This work improves understanding of patient waits, reduces the data burden on clinical teams, supports integrated care, enables better audits and reporting, and helps monitor evidence-based therapies across services.
The 2025 report focuses on:
- Updates and enrichment of existing reference sets
- Inclusion of new clinical pathways and emerging roles
- Reflecting changes in care delivery and workforce
- Clear concept definitions with practical use cases
- Alignment with national guidance documents
Reflections and learning
This recent work highlighted a number of important challenges and learning:
Timelines
Developing new SNOMED CT concepts is a detailed process. Close involvement from clinical experts and the national authoring team has been essential, though this has naturally added time to delivery.
Clinical accuracy
Capturing everyday practice in coded concepts can be quite challenging. A good example is defining “interprofessional consultation” in children and young people’s mental health. Close collaboration was needed between clinicians and the NHS terminology service.
Usability of codes
Consistency matters. Reviewing how concepts are displayed has highlighted ways to make them clearer and more user-friendly for clinicians, helping to reduce errors and support better use of the terminology.
System variation
Mental health IT systems implement SNOMED CT in different ways. Understanding this variation is helping to identify opportunities for greater consistency and improved data quality across services.
Balancing detail
Finding the right balance between detailed concepts for clinical care and more generalised concepts for national reporting is an ongoing process.
Please explore the full report for a more detailed picture.
Resources
NHS SNOMED terminology browser
The NHS Digital SNOMED CT Browser provides ways to view and search the SNOMED CT UK Edition.
Final report
Mental Health Services Dataset SNOMED CT Reference set development
Summary Final Report