NHSX and Mental Health Alpha Update 2

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.

This is split into Stream 1 (embedded team) and Stream 2 (funding existing products). NHSX are taking a strategic view, sharing learning and understanding needs of trusts so that we can develop a model that can be scaled. We are informally calling this Stream 3.

Workshops

We’ve now completed all our inception workshops with the trusts we’re partnering with for Stream 1. This is where we are co-locating digital specialists into local teams to shape the end-to-end pathway and test parts of the service based on findings from discovery

The aim of the workshops was to:

get to know each other
familiarise on what’s been done so far
set objectives and scope for this phase

Oxleas Workshop

On Monday morning we all left the house bright and early on different routes across London to Oxleas! It was great to meet a team who are open to this new way of working. There were only about 11 of us so we kept to time. Things are becoming a little clearer, but we are still waiting to onboard the agency we are working with to refine approach, solid deliverables and timescales.

Team onion with post-it notes of names and roles in the team. Mapped out on ‘core team’, ‘collaborators’ and ‘supporters’

On-boarding new team members

We have a new User Researcher, Ross and a Product Manager, Umut joining our team this week. Ross and Umut will be embedding into the team within Surrey and Borders Partnership Trust (SABP) as part of the 8 week alpha phase and came along to the workshop this week!

Surrey and Borders Workshop

Team photo of the workshop with Surrey and Borders in London

We held the Surrey and Borders Workshop on Wednesday. This was from our London offices in Victoria Street which was a jam-packed room! There were lots more attendees than we expected and this was good for building momentum and exposing the wider team to the project and ways of working. In the afternoon, we looked at the key deliverables the team are proposing and did an exercise to ‘re-frame the problem’. For each one, we split into groups for:

Who are the users?
How are they currently doing this?
What is the problem?
What is our objective? This helped us go from things like ‘self-referral portal’ to ‘an easy way to access the service’.

Follow up calls

We held follow up calls with all Stream 1 sites after the workshop to discuss the design brief and narrow down scope and team. This includes things like our objectives, risks and proposed activities.

Stream 2 Initial Call

This week we held a call with Stream 2 sites. These are:

Worcestershire
Swindon
North West Boroughs
Oxford
Camden

Team photo of Hannah, Perla, Sophie and Nicky in the NHSX team facilitating the Stream 2 call

Stream 2 is providing funding to take existing projects into next stage of maturity

The call was a chance to introduce our team, our way of working and the plan for what Stream 2 will involve. The team is arranging a workshop where teams can drop-in and learn about their product against the GDS Service Standard .

Intro with design agency

We have reviewed the bids for this piece of work for the teams who will be embedding in Oxleas and Alder Hey. We’ll be working with FutureGov and are really looking forward to getting started. Next week we’re holding a planning day to plan the approach, activities and deliverables.

NHS England Team intros

It was good to have a face-to-face session with the team in NHS England. This was useful for setting expectations and finding out our worries and hopes for this work.

Next week - we are meeting with FutureGov, starting embedding in Stream 1 and starting to plan recruitment of users for this phase. If you’re interested in taking part, please get in touch at digitalresearch@nhsx.nhs.uk

We’re learning as much as we can through these partnerships. If you have feedback about our work please fill in this form.

Mental-Health