One of the important outcomes of our analysis was to identify how many people had engaged with the State’s mental health services over time. The distribution of people’s access was not known by the MHC or WA Health as they had not analysed data in this way. We took linked de-identified data from three WA health systems and merged the information to create a database based on individual people’s journeys over time and across the system. This approach offers many ways to look at how the system is working, but most importantly it helps put people rather than activity at the centre of the picture.

Figure 11 shows that between 2013 and 2017 there were 212,679 people who had used State-managed hospital in-patient services, EDs or community treatment services. Of those people:

• 81,662 had used community treatment services only
• 28,690 had used community treatment services and presented at least once at an ED
• 7,222 had used community treatment services and had at least one in-patient stay
• 43,700 had only presented at an ED
• 8,061 had presented at least once at an ED and had at least one in-patient stay
• 5,263 people’s only connection was through in-patient stays
• 38,081 people had at least one contact with each of the three service types we analysed.