National Psychiatric Inpatient Reporting System (NPIRS)

The database records all admissions to, discharges from and deaths in Irish psychiatric units and hospitals on the register of approved centres under the Mental Health Act 2001. The annual reports produced from the database play a key role in the planning of service delivery. National and regional bulletins capturing data for the HSE areas, along with an in-patient census carried out every three years, are also produced from the database. The database also provides much of the data on Performance Indicators (PIs) for the mental health services which are used to monitor targets in certain keys areas of the services.

Purpose: The NPIRS is a psychiatric inpatient database which provides detailed information on all admissions to and discharges from in-patient psychiatric services in Ireland for service planning and delivery, the Department of Health, the HSE, clinicians, service user advocacy groups and research/academics through the quarterly production of KPI reports, the annual report, regional bulletins and requests for data/research collaboration.

Community mental health settings are not included in coverage.

Coverage: All centres approved under the Mental Health Act 2001 including private psychiatric hospitals and child and adolescent units are included.

Data collection commenced in 1963 with a census of all in-patients and annual data has been published since 1965 to the present.