People with mental health problems require comprehensive, integrated physical and mental health care, both in hospital and the community. The Mental Health Inpatient Discharge Summary Standard ensures relevant information is shared among healthcare professionals, facilitating continuity of care when an adult is discharged from inpatient mental health services.

The Mental Health Inpatient Discharge Summary Standard is designed to improve communication between secondary care providers and GPs. It ensures that timely and relevant information about a person’s care and treatment is accessible to GPs, community and acute mental health care teams, and social care professionals. This standard includes details on patient history, social context, medications, hospital admission details, and current and previous diagnoses. By recognising the unique nature of mental illness compared to physical illness, the standard uses inclusive and sympathetic language in its headings and clinical descriptions. This project supports NHS England’s interoperability efforts.

• Enhances professional communication and continuity of care.
• Ensures timely access to relevant patient information.
• Supports integrated care across different healthcare settings.
• Uses inclusive language tailored to mental health care.

• Adult discharge from inpatient mental health services

• Discharge from non-mental health inpatient stay – refer to the eDischarge Summary Standard
• Discharge from emergency care – refer to the Emergency Care Discharge Standard
• Transfer between hospitals – although much of the content may be appropriate
• Discharge from outpatient treatment or other community based community-based period of treatment – refer to Outpatient letter standard

The Mental Health Inpatient Discharge Summary Standard operates by ensuring that all relevant information is recorded and shared in a structured and coded format. This facilitates seamless communication and continuity of care across different healthcare settings.

The hospital electronic patient record (EPR) is expected to be able to generate much of the discharge summary from information recorded in the record such as diagnoses, procedures, medications, investigation results, assessments, patient demographics and other administrative information, with the person completing the record adding other information such as the clinical summary, plan and requested actions.

For full implementation the discharge information should be sent as electronic message using the NHS standard for messaging, HL7 FHIR, detailed here: Transfer of Care message specifications – NHS England