NHS England mental health datasets

NHS England mental health datasets#

Last modified: 07 Nov 2025

The mental health datasets cover inpatient and community mental health services.

Summary:

  • UK LLC holds two NHS England mental health datasets: Mental Health Services Data Set (MHSDS) and NHS Talking Therapies for Anxiety and Depression (IAPT).

  • MHSDS represents secondary care services that record data after a referral is made to a specialist mental health team. These services support individuals with severe or complex mental health conditions such as psychosis, bipolar disorder, gambling, eating disorders and learning disabilities.

  • IAPT covers primary care services designed to help people with mild to moderate mental health problems, such as anxiety and depression.

  • MHSDS is primarily a dataset for administrative purposes. It is comprised of approximately 60 datasets and is particularly complex. UK LLC is collaborating with experts within the community to improve documentation for researchers – we are working on a detailed Understanding MHSDS guide, which will be uploaded shortly.

  • The MHSDS and IAPT datasets are increasingly using clinical terminology to capture clinical information, primarily through SNOMED-CT. See the Coded variables guide for further details.

Overview of mental health datasets#

For further information see the individual dataset guides.

Table 1 Names, geographical coverage and availability of mental health datasets in the UK LLC TRE

Dataset

Dataset name

Grouping

Coverage

Data available in TRE

Data owner

MHSDS1

Mental Health Services Data Set

General

England

01/04/2016 onwards

NHSE

IAPT2

NHS Talking Therapies for Anxiety and Depression

Talking therapies

England

01/04/2012 onwards

NHSE

1MHSDS has two precursor datasets, the Mental Health and Learning Disabilities Data Set (MHLDDS) and the Mental Health Minimum Data Set (MHMDS), which were retired in 2016 and 2015, respectively. Only the MHSDS is currently available in the UK LLC TRE.
2Until mid-2024 called the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies dataset.

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