Key findings
This is the first UK study to report the epidemiology of emergency ambulance attendances for mental health emergencies including self-harm, including linked record outcomes. Most people attended by the ambulance service were either left at home or transported to and discharged from an Emergency Department. Though just over half of all people were only attended to once, repeat calls within 12 months were relatively common. People who were transported to ED but then self-discharged before completion of treatment were statistically more likely to make another emergency call to ambulances service within the same year. People were more likely to self-discharge themselves from the Emergency Department if they were intoxicated with alcohol.
Within 12 months of their first emergency call, 279 people (4.1%) had died, 97 (35%) recorded as suicide. People who were still alive after one day of index attendance numbered 240, of whom 59 were confirmed suicide. Given that in Scotland 772 people died by suicide in the year 2011, this suggests the ambulance clinicians were in contact with about 8% of these individuals.
Comparison with other research
The proportion of attendances that were deemed to be psychiatric emergency or self-harm related was 11% of the final AMPDS codes of all-cause calls to the Scottish Ambulance Service. This compares with research reported for Victoria, Australia by Roggenkamp et al. [15], which estimated 9.5% of emergency attendances were mental health-related. A consideration in comparing these papers is that Scotland has a national health service, including the national ambulance service which is free to access at the point of contact, therefore incentives to gather additional data related to dedicated service utilisation, or secondary diagnoses on which people could be billed may not be present, and may explain some variation. With respect to gender we found just under half of calls (48%) were for women, this compares with Roggenkamp et al. [15] who found that the majority of attended calls were for women (57%), further suggesting different geographical and healthcare contexts are also at play.
Limitations
In common with other record linkage studies [16], this study experienced problems with data quality and accuracy. Missing data was most evident from the A&E2 and SMR1 data sets and this limited our ability to report demographic information on the sample e.g. ethnic group and area-level deprivation indices based on postcode. However data were complete for the outcomes reported in this paper. We used a data set from 2011, which was the most recent reliable year in which data was available at the time of the study. The passage of time and the increased focus of tackling stigma related to psychiatric emergencies and self-harm in Scotland may have altered current practice. We also found that data quality was variable across the differing datasets. Data completion was poorest in the Emergency Department (A&E2 data set) where missing triage data (33.9%) meant that it was not possible to calculate meaningful comparisons between ambulance and emergency department. The original figures provided to us by the Scottish Ambulance Service estimated an annual frequency of 30,000 mental health emergency related calls. Our study identified 9014 calls that we could be confident related to a mental health or self-harm emergency. This discrepancy occurred as a result of the codes that were included as relevant. Ambulance clinicians code calls by the predominant presenting condition. Therefore instances of mental health emergency or self-harm may not be recorded where these took second place to more urgent symptoms. In selecting the strictest criteria of the index event codes we recognise that we have a highly specified cohort at the expense of increased sensitivity to detect many relevant vulnerable people. Our estimates of outcome and service burden are therefore at the lower end of the possible range. Alcohol intoxication and substance misuse are not currently recorded as an AMPDS code. Instead these are separate optional field items that can be coded on the ambulance service electronic patient record as appropriate. Anecdotal feedback suggests that these items are not immediately apparent and their optional completion means that they are frequently not completed. It is therefore likely that the reported frequencies of alcohol intoxication and drug misuse are under reported, though we are unable to state what the missing proportion of cases are.
Implications for practice
Despite the study limitations the results have important implications for practice. Suicide is a leading cause of death in young people and a globally significant public health concern. Scotland is no exception with 746 deaths reported in 2013 equating to a standardised mortality rate of 13.5 per 100,000 [12]. Delivering effective suicide prevention strategies is challenging, as detecting people at risk of suicide is difficult. Our study shows that ambulance clinicians are well placed to identify people at risk of suicide. Just over 1% of people in the study cohort (97/6802) died by suicide within 12 months of their initial presentation to the ambulance service. However, this represents approximately 13% of all people who died by suicide in Scotland within the same time period [12]. The ambulance service therefore have a unique opportunity to deliver a range of potential suicide prevention strategies through developing alternative care pathways to specialist mental health services, delivering suicide prevention interventions, and registering risk of suicide on admission to the Emergency Department.
The high levels of patient repeat mental health emergency calls, and frequency of self-discharges from Emergency Departments further emphasises the importance of developing evidence-based interventions to improve outcomes and reduce service burden. These findings may be explained by qualitative research that suggests that people who experience a psychiatric emergency or have self-harmed often feel that their needs are not met within an Emergency Department [10, 17]. The risk of people with a self-harm history self-discharging from Emergency Departments has, however, been known for over a decade [18]. Action should not be further delayed. Understanding both patients’ experience of Emergency Departments and practitioners’ perceptions of their competencies in dealing with this patient population would support intervention development, enable improvements in patient experience, and reduce rates of self-discharge and suicide.
Ambulance services are rapidly evolving to improve patient outcomes and reduce Emergency Department burden [16]. This places additional requirements and pressures on ambulance clinicians to make complex clinical judgements and decisions that were previously not required. Understanding effective and efficient methods to undertake service redesign and develop effective pre-hospital interventions are urgently required. In response to this need, the Scottish Government is currently piloting a Distress Brief Intervention Programme (www.dbi.scot) that has been developed as a time limited and supportive problem solving intervention for this patient population. The aim is that this programme will improve patient outcomes and reduce demand on the ambulance service and emergency departments [19].
The importance of pre-hospital care settings in the development of suicide prevention strategies has been largely overlooked in Scottish suicide prevention policy to date [16]. Evidence-based suicide prevention strategies should be developed or adapted for pre-hospital emergency care settings. Ambulance services have a unique opportunity to target an identifiably vulnerable cohort and deliver a range of potential prevention strategies that could result in a meaningful decrease in suicides in Scotland. The development of effective interventions with this patient population would contribute to the achievement of NHS England [20] and Scottish Government [21] policy objectives of reducing the number of mental health presentations to Emergency Departments.
Improvements to the processes and outcomes of people who call the Scottish Ambulance Service due to a mental health emergency are required. Half (62%) of the study cohort were either not taken to Emergency Department or were discharged from there with no recorded follow-up. Seventeen percent of calls that ended in an Emergency Department self-discharged prior to completion of their assessment or treatment. These people were more likely to make repeat calls and were potentially at greater risk of death by suicide. Focusing attention on this vulnerable group is likely to lead to improved patient outcomes and decreased service burden.
Future research
Linked data analysis using detailed data-sets such as the ISD unscheduled care data-mart can provide meaningful sources of clinical and service information that can be used to support intervention development and service reorganisation. The method used in this study could be replicated with other clinical conditions. The data from this study were presented at a key stakeholder workshop. The findings of this workshop will be published elsewhere. Data, however, only tell part of the story. Further study is required to understand patients’ experience of Emergency Departments and practitioners’ perceptions of their competencies in dealing with this patient population. Such knowledge would support future intervention development that should then be tested through pragmatic clinical trials.