Mental health capacity in public hospitals
The Northern Territory has maintained the same number of specialised mental health beds for the past seven years, translating to a very minor reduction in per-person capacity as the population has grown slightly.
The figure of 17 metal health beds per 100,000 population sits well below the national average of 27 beds per 100,000
Figure 1: Total number of specialised mental health public hospital beds
Figure 2: Specialised mental health public hospital beds per 100,000 population
Mental health presentations to ED
The number and severity of mental health presentations has been largely steady in the Northern Territory over the past decade. After an increase in the share of emergency and urgent cases in the five years between 2015–16 and 2020–21, the severity of mental health presentations to ED has been falling since 2020-21.
Figure 3: Rate of ED mental health presentations per 10,000 population
Figure 4: Mental health-related ED presentations, by triage category, per cent
Length of stay
The Northern Territory has the lowest median wait time in Australia for ED patients requiring admission to hospital. The data points to a large reduction in wait times in 2022–23, reversing trends in previous years. This reduction does not reflect improved trends in attendance or capacity, pointing to the possibility of skewed or incomplete data for the 2022–23 period.
Figure 6 demonstrates mental health patients have historically spent far less time in hospital in the Northern Territory than across Australia.
Figure 5: Length of stay in ED
Figure 6: Overnight admitted care length of stay (days)
Clinical outcomes
Unfortunately, NOCC casemix data is not available for the Northern Territory. For this reason, this section will be left blank.
Community follow-up
Community follow-up after psychiatric admission/hospitalisation is defined as the proportion of state and territory governments’ specialised public admitted patient overnight acute separations from psychiatric units for which a community-based ambulatory contact was recorded in the seven days following separation.
Figure 8: Rate of community follow-up within 7 days of discharge from a psychiatric admission
