NHSX and Mental Health Update 13
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…
Children and young people’s research analysis session
The team got together to analyse the outputs from our Children and young people’s research. We had originally planned 12 participants, but 2 were excluded because they were out of scope. The team received 6 out of 10 experience mapping packs returned in the post and there were 3 out of 6 follow up interviews with young people.
We laid out the completed maps and took notes on post-its, we also brought our notes from interviews and stuck these up on the wall next to the research questions.
What we found
- Once in CAMHS/CYPMHS, young people felt the experience was positive and it helped them
- The current experience of waiting can cause children and young people to feel scared, alone, lost and confused
- Not hearing from the service can make them feel worse and they can lose trust in CAMHS
- Young people often don’t know what is going to happen or what to expect from their first visit
- Not having enough choice and flexibility in appointments means users are less likely to be able to attend, particularly for those with impairments
- Communications could be more caring and often they don’t meet plain English guidelines
Future blog posts
Researching with children and young people has been incredibly interesting and we’ve learned loads about how to do it. We’re all eager to get some extra blog posts out to share our experiences in the near future.
Shared understanding day
Before starting design workshops, our team spent a full day sharing our learning from the Discovery.
We each took a slot to go through what we had learned from reports, quantitative data, events, chats with suppliers, survey findings, themes from user research and reviews of existing technology.
We created a list of findings based on what we shared, all being underpinned by evidence.
This was a great way to make sure we were all on the same page and allow for the team to discuss what we thought was important from the discovery. It’s a technique that comes highly recommended. Without doing so you can have a team filled with people with jarring interpretations of what we found in the discovery.
At the end of the day, we independently wrote down what we felt were the 15 top findings and scored them in priority order. Each of our sentences to describe a finding was subtly different but we collectively talked through findings so that we all agreed on what they were and what research they related to. We added up the total score for that finding, based on our prioritised list and worked out which findings we thought were more important than others.
This resulted in groups of findings, based on their score.
How Might We statements
We then wanted to reframe our findings into opportunities to design something better. We also wanted to make sure that as a team we were picking things both important but feasible for us to work on (bearing in mind that others may be already tackling some areas).
We voted on 4 areas then reworked them into How Might We statements. These are good at allowing for more variety in how one might approach and tackle a problem or grasp an opportunity.
Design Days
✍️ Team hard at work. Locked away in rooms most of this week being creative about what can come next. pic.twitter.com/aeU1sg1PC4
— Colin Pattinson (@ColinPattinson) October 4, 2019
The purpose of Design Day was to get together to start coming up with ideas around our How Might We statements. Our team have been locked in a room for a few days at that point and were fully immersed in understanding the problem space and our users.
Using a technique called crazy 8’s [a suggestion from a team member was to ditch the name crazy 8’s given its negative connotations and replace with something a bit more welcoming - worth considering!] we sketched out 8 quick ideas in 8 minutes for each of our How Might We statements.
From these 8 ideas we spent considerable time sharing and refining ideas in pairs or collectively as a team. This required acknowledging overlap and weaving individual smart ideas together to coherent propositions.
We also scored these in terms of value and complexity then plotted them on a grid. This is a snapshot view of what is valuable and do-able compared to one another just from the core team’s view. Extra input still required.
What we have right now
We drew up a skeleton of 11 ideas. Ultimately they need more work and evolution but what we have is enough to make a decision on what we should do next (and potentially not do for some!). They have emerged from evidence, so the team are happy. Practical ideas that we think would be incremental positive improvements across different parts of a user’s journey through CYPMHS.
Product briefs
To help convey ideas we are back using an updated version of product briefs (as mentioned in update #2 ). It’s a boiled down version of the idea which touches on:
- a brief description
- a visual representation of the idea
- a link to a How Might We statement and therefore to a finding from research
- what potential hypotheses we could test in an alpha phase
- feasibility
- team shape
- extra considerations (more to add after a future ethics/consequence scanning event)
The purpose of these are to convey ideas, but also have enough information to make decisions about before committing to more work.
The work to refine some of these ideas into what we can take forward in an alpha phase continues.
Secretary of State meeting
This week we had the opportunity to meet with Matt Hancock, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, to update him on the progress of our work.
Our team put together some slides talking through our methodology, findings from the research and voice clips to represent users. Colleagues from DHSC/NHSE/NHSX provided context for other work going on within the digital/mental health space. We collectively expressed the opportunity to make things better and got really positive feedback from people as we walked out the room.
Participant feedback
As the team have finished our primary research, we have decided to capture feedback on the experience of taking part. This includes questions about what it was like, the quality of information on what the research was about and communications leading up to the research.
We tried really hard to make participants feel safe and comfortable taking part, so in the people we recruited directly, it’s good to see so far that the research met their expectations and they found it to be a positive experience.
We have received some constructive feedback from participants through the recruitment agency about feeling overwhelmed, so we will take action to make sure we improve our engagement with recruitment agencies next time.
Thanks to everyone who has completed it so far. This will be used to help us improve our ongoing participant recruitment process and make it more enjoyable and safer to take part in user research at NHSX.
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!