NHSX and Mental Health 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) from team members working in the mental health space…

Publishing our first update!

If you haven’t read update one then check it out.

I imagine these will evolve over time but for now we are on a roll…

Weekly planning and retrospective

Nice to have the gang all back together after some of the team on holiday. We mostly stuck to time and had a constructive update about all the work going on around mental health. We had a retrospective and then had some actions to make things better.

Prioritisation

Most significant event of the week has been bringing together a band of experts to help decide what is the most valuable and urgent problem we should be investing in.

This has taken a lot of input and work to get to this point. Prior to the session this week we had;

• held the ambition to get feedback from outside the walls of Skipton House (including advocacy groups, clinicians, across departments, subject matter experts, etc)
• we got ideas from them as well as feedback.
• These were tied to stated ambitions from NHSX and in the long term plan - so weren’t wildly off course from other efforts to define what is important to work on
• by the cut off point we had 61 separate ideas
• we had a first cut of which ideas were the right sized problem we could undertake
• this left 15 seperate problems/opportunities to drill down into. We put them into a form of product brief. I am hoping for a blog post soon about this in more detail so can share the template we used. Instructions on filling these out were: “they are deliberately minimal and I only want them to include just enough information for us to make a decision”

On the day;

• we started immediately after the retrospective. Sadly time constraints on team members made us have to squish the session in half. After some cutting and dicing of tasks we got on our way.
• first we clarified what the purpose of the day was and we were going to score each of the 15 proposals based on value and urgency (with accompanying definitions of what value and urgency were defined as)
• to avoid bias and groupthink we did this silently, with people reading through and making notes and then assigning a score
• after everyone was done we re-grouped over coffee and earl grey and went through each one saying what score was given and a justification for that score.
• after listening to one another, the squad (while I facilitated and took notes) got to amend their scores after hearing each others opinion.
• by the end we had 3 high scoring ideas that had separated themselves from the pack. All 3 representing a different theme.

What’s happening now;

• since then we have iterated the original ideas/proposals and sent them on to wider group for feedback and eventually sign off.

Word frequency from ideas

From those 61 ideas I decided to look at the frequency of words used across all of them.

The top 5 were; 16 = services, 16 = access, 13 = care, 10 = available, 10 = online

I haven’t worked out yet what to do with this yet but might be interesting to consider the things that are absent rather than present.

Capability

Last week we said…

One of the other big aspirations of having NHSX people entwined with NHSE colleagues is to expose alternative ways of working and build capability.

To this end we had more chats this week about what sort of things we think would be valuable to colleagues to learn about. We’ve got an initial steer that some introductions into agile and discoveries make sense for now but this is just a first step. We’ll be mixing practical experience and immersion with more standard opportunities to learn.

Oxford

A trip to rainy Oxford University happened with discussions about digital, ethics and well-being.

I heard about a new term I’d not heard before… “context collapse”. Was explained as the phenomenon when your online persona comes in conflict with your in person persona. So you might present yourself as a certain type of person online but then when people meet you in real life and you are a different version of you then expected it causes the bond to fall apart. I know so little about this but sounds fascinating.

Find out more

If you want to stay informed about wider NHSX work then check out @NHSX on Twitter.