NHSX and Mental Health Alpha Update 7

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’ve been very busy In Surrey. We organised a workshop with children and young people and did some co-design activities with them, which was well received. We started creating and visualizing the user journey for children and young people. We have also prototyped the parent referral journey including landing pages, the call me back form and the referral form.

Oxleas

This week we hosted a show-and-tell to share all the work that has been happening on this project with a larger group of people. It was really well attended and the room was packed with clinicians, and senior leaders in Oxleas CAMHS to hear about the work we have been doing.

The feedback was really positive and most people supported the direction that the project was heading in.

Our team at FutureGov have started developing a prototype which we plan to test next week

Alder Hey

This week the team at Alder Hey carried out:

Our first retro
Tech mapping session
Building some prototypes
Testing the referral form with social workers

The tech mapping session took place on Monday with FutureGov and the IT and Innovation team at Alder Hey. This shows how data currently moves through the service.

Map of the data flowing through the service on post-it notes

Off the back of the prototyping session last week, the team prioritised hypotheses to test based on the original deliverables. These were:

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
We think that by creating a single front door for CYP and parents we will achieve better access to information and services available They did a great job building prototypes together on paper and with the free prototyping tool Figma.

At the end of the week, the standard referral form was tested with social workers.

Photo of the referral form being tested in action with member of the Innovation Team and social workers

The team took the other prototype (content cards for better access to information) over to the CAMHS waiting room for some pop-up research. There wasn’t anybody there, so they will try again Monday morning!

Stream 3 update

This week we started thinking about our Service Model for mental health. From what we understand, a Service Model is a way for organisations to create, test and scale the design of services. We are testing and documenting different approaches that we can use to support trusts to design their service in line with best practice.

Based on insights from Stream 3 interviews, we have started to think about what we need from the service model and the levels of support we can offer to trusts. Here are some early thoughts.

A slide of some early thoughts on what we need from a service model. It includes things like being able to empower trusts to improve their service and giving them the practical tools and techniques to do this, such as types of roles in the teams, and showing them what good looks like

We are carrying on our interviews for Stream 3, this time with wider stakeholders across the trusts to learn about their needs and opportunities for support. In our shared learning sessions, we are starting to ideate some approaches our team can take in future based on learnings from these partnerships.

If you have insights to share on service models or anything that has worked well for you in the past embedding user-centred design into local teams, please get in touch.

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