NHSX and Mental Health Alpha Update 4

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.

First day in Alder Hey

We kicked off the week in Alder Hey introducing the FutureGov team. In the morning we had a useful session updating the service map with info from key partners such as YPAS.

We started to plot activities we could do that would help to answer our key questions. The wider team wrote down all activities that needed to happen, ‘now’,’ ‘next’ and ‘later’.

In the afternoon, the core team sat around and were introduced to Trello! We started planning activities for each sprint, assigning tasks to each other. It became clear we were using too much digital lingo, so this document helped explain what we mean when we say things like ‘ceremonies’ and ‘slack’.

One of the things we want to explore is entry points to the service. The team split up to start the content audit of entry points, printing out and sticking up screenshots (see below). We sat with the Project Manager to book in key dates for show and tells, research and rooms.

First day in Oxleas

The following day we introduced the FutureGov team to the project team at Oxleas. As the team had already started their service map we sprung right into action, running through the user journey, identifying problems and opportunities. Through this we identified the area of the service that was the biggest opportunity - the waiting time before a first assessment.

As a team we identified how we will work together going forward. We will be using Slack and Trello! To make sure that all stakeholders (including Oxleas, NHSX, FutureGov and MindWave) are feeding into the work and are up to speed with what is going on.

Towards the end of the day, I was lucky enough to attend a demo and discussion for the prototype of the Oxcare online patient record. This gave great context for what the CAMHS project will be feeding into.

The remainder of the week has involved planning how we will do user research for service improvement, including how best to recruit participants to take part and who will be doing this.

NHSE check-in

We had our fortnightly check-in with the team in NHS England. This was useful to update on where we’re at with Stream 1 and our plans for 1-1 check-ins with Stream 2.

The main actions were to book in check-ins calls with Stream 2 sites and find ways of letting more people know about our work to get involved and share learnings.

Stream 3 planning

We planned our research questions for Stream 3 this week and sent out a research schedule. We’re planning to conduct 1-1 interviews with different roles in the trusts and wider stakeholders to understand:

-Their role and responsibilities -How service improvement and change happens in the trust -Their experience, motivations and challenges to working in this way.

This will help our team in NHSX to improve the services we offer to local trusts and learn more about how our approaches can be scaled.

SABP

We returned to Surrey on Tuesday where we did a very high level roadmap of what we hoped to get out of the first few sprints based on our deliverables. The team then carried on to launch their first sprint on Wednesday with planning activities. Their first task was to go and talk to internal staff in Guildford to understand the current behind the scenes processes. Overall a very productive week in which we fully embedded and really started getting into the thick of it. All made super easy by being able to work with such a great and enthusiastic team in the trust!

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