The Goals and Limitations of Israel's Psychiatric Case Register

Abstract

The Israeli Ministry of Health maintains a psychiatric case register that includes basic demographic and clinical information for all psychiatric hospital admissions since 1950. Currently, the case register includes information about some 130,000 people who have been hospitalized. The case register is an important tool in many aspects of mental health care planning, such as delineating problem populations, developing interventions, assessing the ramifications of policies, enacting programs for quality control, and conducting research. In certain situations stipulated by law, some information in the case register is shared with other authorities. Although the full potential of the psychiatric case register has not been exploited so far, creation of additional linkages with other databases and increased application of case register data in field studies could enhance its usefulness.

Maternal household crowding during pregnancy and the offspring's risk of schizophrenia

“…It includes demographic information from birth certificates augmented with data from obstetric and pediatric departments, municipal well-baby clinics, follow-up of vital status, and interviews with some mothers. Its methods have been summarized elsewhere (Harlap et al, 1977;Lichtenberg et al, 1999) and some 80 reports from the study have focused on short-and long-term outcomes. The cohort data were crossed-linked with Israel's national registry of psychiatric disease.…”

“…Established in the Ministry of Health in 1950, the Psychiatric Registry receives information about all psychiatric diagnoses, including reports from patients admitted to psychiatric hospitals, psychiatric wards within general hospitals, and psychiatric day-care facilities. The registry's design and methods have been described in detail elsewhere and it has been used for clinical and epidemiologic research in schizophrenia (Harlap et al, 1977;Lichtenberg et al, 1999). In the past decade, studies using the Jerusalem Perinatal Study, linked to other databases in Israel, showed that the offspring' identification numbers, sex, birth dates, and basic demographic information, including parental ages, were more than 99.9% accurate (Lichtenberg et al, 1999;Laor et al, 1997).…”

Catatonic Schizophrenia: A Cohort Prospective Study

“…Run by the Ministry of Health since 1950, 13 the Registry contains a record of all admissions to psychiatric wards and day facilities and includes dates of admission and discharge and a single discharge diagnosis for each episode, assigned by a board-certified psychiatrist. These diagnoses are coded with the ICD; codes from earlier years have been updated to 10th Revision (ICD-10), and those for psychotic disorders have been validated recently.…”

Lower risk of prostate cancer in schizophrenia: fact or artifact?

“…The PCR is legally mandated to maintain a cumulative record of all psychiatric hospitalizations [12][13] . The PCR provided the subjects' diagnoses upon admission and discharge as well as socio-demographic information.…”