A descriptive study of the primary care use of people with a diagnosis of severe mental illness: A focus on cardiovascular and cardiometabolic health and risk factor screening
Project Details
This project uses Patron data to provide a detailed understanding of the numbers of people who have severe mental illness attending practice practice, how these people use primary care services over a 12-month period, the cardiometabolic assessments and screening they receive, and the rates of medication use.
Patron ID: PAT089
Project Lead:
Aims:
- To describe the demographics and number of patients that have a diagnosis of the specified (serious) mental health conditions per practice
- To summarise the average number of total visits to primary care and frequency of key MBS billable items to better understand the frequency of primary care use; the frequency of screening for cardiometabolic risk and disease and outcomes of these investigations; and the number of types of referrals to specialists across the population.
People with severe mental illness (SMI), which includes schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, psychosis and major depression and others, have high rates of cardiometabolic and cardiovascular illness than people without SMI. This is driven by medication side effects, poor lifestyle, socioeconomic disadvantage and diagnostic overshadowing whereby physical health issues are attributed to the primary mental health diagnosis. There is also a 10-20 year reduction in life expectancy compared to people without SMI, suggesting that greater efforts should be made to improve the physical health outcomes of this population.
Primary care is the most appropriate setting to achieve these improvements as GPs have a central coordination role in the health of patients crossing physical and mental health and different health settings.
Evidence has established that people with SMI are frequent users of primary care, but the details of these contacts and information about the care that is delivered is not well described. In this study the data collated under the Patron program will be investigated to better understand the way people with SMI engage with primary care services, and how they are assessed, provided with screening and preventative care and supported. We know that physical health screening rates decreased through the pandemic for the general population and suspect that this decrease will be larger for people with SMI. If the data allows, we will compare the screening rates for people with SMI with the screening rates for the general population before the onset of the pandemic to now..