NHSX and Mental Health Alpha Update 5

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.

Stream 1 update

Oxleas

This week we ran through the service journey again, running through each users’ experience: staff, children and young people and parents, families and carers. Following this we selected some key hypotheses that we were going to test going forward by adding post its with questions, ideas and challenges for each hypothesis.

Next week we will carry out some guerrilla testing in the waiting room to test whether our hypotheses resonate with users. This will feed into an ‘ideation’ session from FutureGov where we will begin discussing ideas and sketch some prototypes.

Alder Hey

We started to visualise our work on the wall so that members of the wider team can see what we’ve been up to. This really helps the core team to have a shared understanding and to reflect on the previous research insights that led to this work - with quotes from parents, staff and young people.

It also helps to see where we are up to in the design process.

We have written hypotheses based on the initial ideas submitted in the EOI. Next week, we’re going to pick some hypotheses to test and FutureGov are running a prototyping session on how we do this.

NHSX Team

It was the end of our third sprint - a lot of good work happening across all NHS mental health trusts! We did a team retro taking stock of how we think the project is going so far. Some things we were happy about was how much we’ve learned about setting up projects like this again for the future and the way we’ve coordinated good communication across the project. We then planned for our next sprint and noted actions from our retro. To celebrate the end of sprint we did team fika - inspired by Hannah’s trip to Sweden.

Surrey

In Surrey we completed our first sprint on Wednesday! 🎉We had our first sprint review and retro. We have really gotten into the swing of our sprints and ceremonies. We are learning a lot from the trust and sharing our own knowledge and experience of user centred design and agile.

We have started a lot of artefacts and we are putting everything on the wall to work in the open so other teams can see what we are up to.

Stream 2 update

We’ve planned 1:1 check-ins with all sites from Stream 2. This is a chance to find out where they’re up to with delivery, what activities they are doing and the team in place delivering them.

Then we can provide more tailored support or resources and flag anything to NHS England that needs clarifying to the trusts.

Stream 3 update

Stream 3 first round of interviews

We conducted 6 interviews this week as part of Round 1 research. This was with people in the direct teams we are collaborating with. We wanted to find out:

• How are trusts currently delivering improvements to their service?
• Where are the opportunities to improve how they do digital transformation?
• What is the governance structure and how are decisions made?
• Who is the right team to implement service change/improvement?
• What are the needs of the trusts we work with including motivations and barriers to implementing user-centred design? The team conducted the research with 1 interviewer and 1 note-taker. We tried to switch up the interviews between us so that it wasn’t always the team member who has been the main point of contact. All findings will be reported anonymously, but participants were made aware at the start of the session that some things they do share could identify them, so to be mindful of this during the interview.

At the end of the round, we got together with transcripts to analyse in a shared learning day - these will happen every 2 weeks!

Stream 3 Shared learning day

Our NHSX team working on Stream 1 embedded teams got together to share our learnings so far, as part of Stream 3 on how we scale this approach.

What we did

• Recap on the problem statement and our aims
• Stuck the main research goals on the wall
• Swapped transcripts, highlighted and took notes from each transcript
• Stuck them on the wall and grouped them
• Discussed and wrote up key insights
• Captured our observations so far (on working with trusts and scaling this approach)
• Completed a first draft of a capability maturity model (site A, site B and site C)

This took a lot of time and was quite intense. For the next shared learning session, the user researchers are going to spend a bit of time prepping notes ready for the team to start grouping and theming!

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