Abstract
Background: Population surveys estimate mental-disorder burden and treatment gaps, whereas administrative summaries describe reported counts recorded by health systems. These quantities are easily conflated. The Saudi Ministry of Health (MoH) published 2024 outpatient and inpatient counts for 11 broad ICD-10 mental-disorder groups, with new and repeated portions. This study provides a transparent description of the table while keeping interpretation within its measurement limits.
Methods: We extracted the six count columns and diagnostic codes from Table 4-18 of the official MoH Statistical Yearbook 2024. An immutable workbook hash, row arithmetic, and published marginal totals were checked before analysis. For each setting, we calculated diagnostic shares and the proportion labelled repeated, then summarized between-setting differences with the top-three share, Herfindahl index, and total-variation distance. No patient linkage, uncertainty interval, hypothesis test, or denominator beyond the table was introduced.
Results: The source reported 698,772 outpatient counts and 23,698 inpatient counts. Mood disorders (27.28%), schizophrenia-spectrum and delusional disorders (24.58%), and neurotic/stress-related/somatoform disorders (17.73%) comprised 69.58% of outpatient counts. Schizophrenia-spectrum and delusional disorders (33.54%), mood disorders (23.28%), and psychoactive-substance-use disorders (18.51%) comprised 75.34% of inpatient counts. The inpatient share exceeded the outpatient share by 13.20 percentage points for substance-use disorders and 8.96 points for schizophrenia-spectrum disorders; it was 9.88 points lower for neurotic/stress-related/somatoform disorders. Repeated-labelled counts represented 80.33% of the outpatient total and 45.83% of the inpatient total. All 11 within-row additions and all six column sums matched the publication.
Conclusions: The reported diagnostic composition differs between MoH mental-health outpatient and inpatient published counts in 2024. These are descriptive properties of administrative aggregates, not disorder prevalence, admission risk, readmission, or care quality. Clear unit definitions and patient-linked data are required before those questions can be answered.
Keywords
- mental health services
- Saudi Arabia
- administrative data
- ICD-10
- outpatient
- inpatient
- service composition
Declarations
- Ethics approval
- NA
- Consent to participate
- NA
- Consent for publication
- NA
- Funding
- NA
- Competing interests
- NA
- Author contributions
- NA
- Data availability
- NA
- Registration
- NA
- Acknowledgements
- NA
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