Comparison of mental health service activity before and shortly after UK social distancing responses to the COVID-19 pandemic: February-March 2020
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Abstract
This study sought to provide an early description of mental health service activity before and after national implementation of social distancing for COVID-19. A time series analysis was carried out of daily service-level activity on data from a large mental healthcare provider in southeast London, from 01.02.2020 to 31.03.2020, comparing activity before and after 16.03.2020: i) inpatient admissions, discharges and numbers, ii) contact numbers and daily caseloads (Liaison, Home Treatment Teams, Community Mental Health Teams); iii) numbers of deaths for past and present patients. Daily face-to-face contact numbers fell for liaison, home treatment and community services with incomplete compensatory rises in non-face-to-face contacts. Daily caseloads fell for all services, apart from working age and child/adolescent community teams. Inpatient numbers fell 13.6% after 16 th March, and daily numbers of deaths increased by 61.8%.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.09.26.20202150: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Considering other limitations, data for this manuscript were drawn from specific services of interest and do not reflect SLaM’s full activity; they were also combined by broad service categories and we did not seek to investigate within-service variation. Daily contact numbers were quantified from structured fields applied to case note …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.09.26.20202150: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Considering other limitations, data for this manuscript were drawn from specific services of interest and do not reflect SLaM’s full activity; they were also combined by broad service categories and we did not seek to investigate within-service variation. Daily contact numbers were quantified from structured fields applied to case note entries and might reflect recording behaviour rather than activity levels (e.g. if multiple contacts were recorded within one entry); also, the dichotomy between face-to-face and non-face-to-face contact is a relatively crude one and does not reflect the quality or depth of assessments being recorded. Finally, statistical power was limited because of the short period evaluated, as well as being limited by lack of data on cause of death and applied to a heterogeneous sample of past and present service users. First author’s note, in the interests of transparency: the findings reported in this paper were submitted in manuscripts to BMJ Open, BJPsych Open, and BJPsych Bulletin, with the first submission on 21st April 2020 after a data extraction on 2nd April 2020 (daily deaths data were updated in a subsequent extraction for later submissions). The findings were adjudicated to be insufficiently informative by the first two journals and the manuscript was rejected by the third because of difficulties obtaining reviews. By the time final feedback was received (31st July 2020), the study was judged by the authors to be too out of date for further atte...
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
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