NHSX and Mental Health Alpha Update 1
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) this week…
Context
NHSX and NHS England recently completed a discovery on Children and Young People’s Mental Health. For the alpha phase , the team wants to take this a step further and have a hands-on approach that has impact in the real world. We are setting up partnerships with local trusts to test parts of the service and build capability in user-centred design.
We have split our alpha phase into:
Stream 1: Co-locate digital specialists in local teams to shape the end-to-end pathway and test parts of the service based on findings from discovery
Stream 2: Provide funding to take existing projects into the next stage of maturity
Thank you to everyone who applied. Individual trusts were selected based on an initial EOI application, shortlisting and interviews with the teams.
In the central team, NHSX are taking a strategic view to align the streams of work towards a wider vision for CYP mental health. We will be sharing learning and understanding the needs of trusts so that we can develop a model that can be scaled.
This is our first weekly update for this phase of the project.
Inception day
Our team got together to agree scope and objectives for this piece of work as the central NHSX team. Some of the things we discussed were:
Alpha problem statement: “How Might We embed user-centred design methods into local teams and help them to test ideas that support Children and Young People waiting to access mental health services?”
Our aims:
- Make sustainable change by exposing new ways of working to build better services
- Empower staff to use some tools, approaches and ideas beyond our involvement
- Provide scalable solutions to any common problems for digital service delivery (This could include standardised user research findings, service design patterns, benefits cases, code repositories etc.)
Some more objectives from the team were:
- Create learning that can be scaled
- Improve outcomes for CYP
- Understand the needs of trusts we work with
- Give tools and techniques to local trusts to continue beyond our involvement
- Demonstrate what good interventions to support delivery of digital services looks like
- HMW introduce/professionalise DDAT into NHS
- Setting up a legacy
Key questions
To do that, we need to understand:
- How are trusts currently delivering improvements to their service?
- Where are the opportunities to support?
- Who is the right team to implement service change/improvement?
- What is the governance structure and decision making process?
- What are the needs of the trusts we work with including motivations and barriers to implementing user-centred design?
- Which ideas best support children and young people whilst they are waiting to access mental health services?
Setting up the team
We are bringing in contractors and suppliers to help support the embedded teams for Stream 1. This week we have been interviewing potential service designers and user researchers to join us :)
Workshops
We’ve arranged a series of initial workshops with the successful Stream 1 sites.
This week we held our first workshop in Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. It was great to meet the team face to face, familiarise with what’s been done so far and start agreeing scope and objectives for the partnership. Next week, we have workshops booked in with the other sites Oxleas and Surrey.