NHSX and Mental Health Update 10

This is an informal update to NHSX’s commitment to:

Digital and data specialists from NHSX will team up with NHS England’s mental health national policy teams to help clinicians and policymakers improve patient experience through technology.

This is a selection of things that happened (other things also happened) from team members working on a discovery into children, young people and mental health…

Visiting the Behavioural Insights team

A member of the team visited the behavioural insights team to hear about previous work in mental health and any upcoming research.

Team has already heard about reducing missed appointments through texts and got some extra feedback about what we have learned thus far.

Show and tell

Team contributed to the NHSX show and tell to share our work with the wider organisation. There was some good feedback and lots of questions.

We had a question about how we have identified who we should research with and about what comes next/working with others. For CAMHS locations, we’ve aimed to visit some of those with the highest waiting times, and some examples of best practice. This has also been opportunistic based on the response from sites and our team availability.

It’s important we keep sharing and updating our colleagues and stakeholders of the work in progress.

CYP research methods

Well done MH team @NHSX getting packs out this week 👏🌟
We’re experimenting with the idea of children and young people mapping out their experience waiting for support. Lots of iterations thnx to advice from clinicians/teachers. Any tips on what to expect?! pic.twitter.com/KkElE4Xkpt

— Sophie Rankin (@SophieAnnRankin) September 13, 2019

The team managed to send out the experience mapping tasks to children and young people this week! Huge thanks to the teachers and clinicians who helped us to create each iteration, by providing their expertise and feedback.

Our clinician team member gave us some great tips on eliciting emotions and feelings of younger children (e.g. under 11). This led to a cartoon storyboard and prompts for each box, whereas for older children we have left the task more open-ended.

We’ve created 2 versions; one for children aged 8-11 and another for 12-25 years old. All include:

Participants will complete and return to us in a pre-paid envelope and by taking photographs.

We’re going to be following this up with remote video calls with young people, using the map as stimulus.

Logistics

Consent has been obtained ahead of the session via the recruitment agency we’ve worked with to help source participants. We are also providing support leaflets as part of the debrief.

This has been an exciting activity for the team… from the iterations of the map itself to the factory packaging and preparing packs, through to managing the postage/labelling… we’re looking forward to seeing what comes out of it.

We also realised mid-packing that 2 participants were from Scotland so had to be discounted - this was a mistake on our part as we hadn’t specified Scotland wasn’t included in the same CAMHS service. Lesson learnt - next time we’ll make sure to include this in the screener!

Surveys

As with any discovery project, the team has limited capacity to conduct site visits and interviews with everyone. Although we prefer contextual research as much as possible, it’s still really valuable we hear from those we aren’t able to attend.

In order to try and cope with input that still may fly in as we are already out in the field or doing research with a participant we’ve created a few surveys for others to contribute. It’s essential to hear people’s experiences in order to make things better. We want to make sure there is an avenue to do so.

If you’d like to take part as a parent, follow this link: https://www.smartsurvey.co.uk/s/parent-survey

If you’d like to take part as CAMHS staff, you can do here: https://www.smartsurvey.co.uk/s/CAMHS-staff/

Remote research with parents

Thank you to all the parents who have taken part in the research sessions this week. It’s been really harrowing listening to parent’s experiences whilst waiting for their child’s support from CAMHS/CYPMHS. We really appreciate people taking the time to help make the service better for others and although everyone’s experience is different, some key themes are starting to emerge.

We’ve had in-person interviews, video and audio calls with our researcher and note taker… these will continue for the rest of this week.

Home visits

To help us empathise with parents and to make sure people feel comfortable opening up to us, the team has visited parent’s homes this week to conduct the interviews. This has hopefully made things easier for parents being able to see us face to face, and has really helped to understand the context of their family life and the area in which they live.

Has anyone done home visits before in user research? Feel like it really helped us to build empathy with parents and their lifestyles🏡 ... and there’s puppies in the debrief! 🐾 @NHSX #cypmh #mentalhealth pic.twitter.com/6xIQdoEA6U

— Sophie Rankin (@SophieAnnRankin) September 12, 2019

Thinking about constraints

The team are considering what potential constraints there could be on improving the experience of waiting. For the time being it’s a rather messy google doc touching on legal, policy, tech, processes, politics and a few other themes. We’ll need to get more feedback as we progress but thoughts on the future are taking place.

Find out more

If you want to stay informed about wider NHSX work then check out @NHSX on Twitter.

If you want to give us feedback or get in touch with the team then you can do so using this form!