NHSX and Mental Health Alpha Update 8

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

On 10th and 12th March we had two “CYP hybrid workshops and co-design” activities. We also iterated our “CYP journey maps” and prototypes accordingly.

Photograph of the insights from children and young people’s workshop

Annotated prototype screens with notes from children and young people in the workshop

Oxleas

Our prototype has been designed and is ready for testing. We are using the Marvel app to give a real sense of what the automated text chat idea might look like. This will now be tested with participants.

Example screenshot of the chatbot idea being tested with children and young people

Given the COVID-19 we will be conducting user research remotely. A key challenge around this is recruiting participants to take part. Currently we are working with clinicians at Oxleas, who are still in contact with patients, and who can help recruit people to test the prototype.

Alder Hey

On Monday morning the team tested the single point of entry with parents. We wanted to find out what information was important to people when looking for support for their child, where they go for this and how easy it is to find. This was done with a card sorting exercise. Participants also started on Google to see what search terms they would use and where this would take them, evaluating the current content on existing sites.

Card sorting exercise. This is a photograph of cards of information sorted into piles of ‘not important’ ‘important’ and ‘really important’. Some of the information on the cards includes things like ‘ways I can help my child’, ‘where can I go for help’ and ‘stories from other parents’.

Photograph of parent entering search terms to browse on Google

The team presented their first Show and Tell to the wider stakeholders across Alder Hey and the CCG. This went really well and it was great to share progress on the insights, hypotheses and prototypes that were being tested. This has all been stuck on the wall in the project space, which really helped for taking stakeholders through what the team had been up to. We’re planning a remote Show and Tell on Tues 31st March to present the final work.

Photograph of team member pointing to the project wall, with post-its, service maps, insights and prototype testing stuck on there.

Photograph of a team member presenting at the Show and Tell with the audience watching.

Stream 2 workshop

The central NHSX team held a workshop with all the successful Stream 2 sites. These are the trusts who received funding to take their product or idea into the next phase of maturity, with light touch support from the NHSX team in line with best practice.

Photograph of team member presenting and attendees listening

The aim of the workshop was to:

It went really well and we had great feedback from those who attended. We have set up a shared Slack Channel for all trusts working on Children and Young People’s Mental Health services to collaborate. Please feel free to join this if you are currently delivering an NHS mental health service for children and young people.

Here are our slidesfrom the day too.

Stream 3 update

Interviews for Stream 3 have continued, this round is for stakeholders and collaborators. The main things we wanted to find out from these interviews is their perspective on how change happens within the wider trust and motivations/barriers for implementing user-centred design. We have a shared learning session next week to synthesise our interviews and refine our research questions for the final round.

NHSX met with FutureGov to discuss what we wanted to get out of a service model and came up with some ideas for outputs.

We have started to:

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