NHSX and Mental Health Alpha Update 6

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

Surrey

We successfully completed Sprint 2! In this sprint, we drafted out “as is” and “to be” journey maps for parents. We also drafted some initial wireframes ready for prototyping in our next sprint.

Oxleas

Some quick guerilla research in the waiting room proved our assumption to be true about users’ lack of awareness of where to go for support and information. This was a great starting point for our ideation session this week, hosted by FutureGov and attended by a range of stakeholders from across Oxleas. We were able to share what we have been working on so far with them and sketch up some prototypes to test. One focusing on how to improve triage and one focusing on how to support those waiting. The prototypes lined up really well and gave us a starting point for some ideas to test.

Alder Hey

At Alder Hey this week, we held a prototyping session hosted by FutureGov upskilling the team in the design process and low fidelity prototyping. The team prioritised one of the hypothesis to start prototyping based on the initial ideas in their expression of interest application. This was…

“We think that by improving the referral process for staff and service users we will achieve freeing up clinicians time to reduce waiting times for service users.”

The team played around with paper prototypes and the form on

There was also a tech presentation that took place to present the software solutions available.

Stream 2 update

We have had a call with Worcestershire to learn about their plans for the BESTIE app and to encourage prototyping and testing with users.

We shared with them the following resources:

• What user research is and why it’s important
• Blog about prototyping and testing
• IDEO Design Methods - some methods you can use to find out what works
• Blog about putting people at the heart of technology (with some common misconceptions)
• Blog about focus groups and why they are limited

Stream 3 update

Stream 3 Round 1 Insights

Following 2 weeks of interviews with project leads in trusts we hosted an analysis session, where we pulled out emerging insights from these interviews that can inform the next steps of stream 3 work. While all the trusts that we are working with are completely different and work in different ways, it was really interesting to see that the challenges that they face are similar. This has provided a really good starting point for us to think about how we at NHSX can help trusts to overcome these challenges. We have two more sprints of interviews for this part of the stream 3 work. The next few weeks will focus on speaking to stakeholders within trusts that are affiliated with the project.

Service models with FutureGov

On Tuesday we went over to FutureGov for our fortnightly catch up and reflected on our Stream 1 work so far - what’s been going well and any learnings. We then feedback key insights from our stream 3 interviews with trusts to support our thinking in how we can scale projects like these. FutureGov introduced their approach to service models and we’ll be working together to build our own mental health service model.

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