NHSX and Mental Health Update 3

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 updates!

If you haven’t read updates 1 and 2 then check them out.

These will evolve over time…

Sign off

The team is a brand new partnership between NHSE and NHSX. NHSX is only a few weeks old so all the practices, cultures, ceremonies and processes have not settled into place yet. As such the team has been getting sign off from both organisations before beginning.

Forms were filled and comments given. Calls were made and chats happened. It wasn’t overly exciting but the good news is that thumbs up were given. In effect this means we have agreement to crack on.

The problem we are working on…

After some excellent efforts to both solicit ideas, deliberate over what is valuable and urgent and do some prioritisation we now have agreed to tackle an issue to do with children and young people (0-25 year olds) and waiting times. I’m going to write something specific about the problem (on my to do list) but it’s a fascinating area with opportunities to do some real good.

Snippets of why we think it’s important:

• huge variation in how long people wait and also what levels of communication they get while they wait (we have heard it can be from 4 weeks to 2+ years)
• some receive little care or support while they wait so we are not helping people to resolve their issues or encourage them to help themselves
• we aren’t excellent at preparing people for future appointments
• there is a link between waiting times and do not attend rates (which can be very costly to the NHS)

I’ll share more in a bespoke update! We are trying to start the discovery very soon!

Planning and retro

Planning and retrospectives with the mental health digital crew continue. Lots of chats and we used Fun Retro as people were working from home and avoiding the blistering heat.

Actions included:

• using Trello for retro
• sharing the ways of working during the discovery document to wider audience written a few weeks ago
• work with CQC about an agenda for a future event.

NHSX assurance process

Linked to getting sign off, the team has been a guinea pig for a new way to get assurance to begin. I’ve had plenty of experience with spend control forms and plenty of aspiration to evolve them.

My review thus far:

• far less time consuming
• relatively simple asks
• loved how proportional it is. Clearly an ethos is to prioritise what gets more scrutiny and avoid applying the same amount of time and effort across every single proposed bit of work (no matter of size, cost or shape)
• felt collaborative rather than a test
• ultimately better than before, which is only a good thing.

Potential users

Superstar James helped delve deeper into who the users are. More work to do but we’ve started to group users who will have different needs and contexts. It’s a super interesting space as we’ve got children and we have young people.

This group goes from 0-25 years old. A 24 year old and a 7 year old are likely to have different needs. Their dependency on their parents/guardians/carers adds a new lens. We’ve also got health professionals in the mix (GPs to mental health professionals). We know people in schools and social workers might also have a role to play in the space so lots of groups to spend time with.

I’ll provide more detail in a future write up!

Healthy London Partnership event

Invited to an event from the Healthy London Partnership. The event was all about open data, mental health, open active and social prescribing.

Was really well ran and interesting gathering of folk. Thank goodness there were also fans in the room so participants didn’t melt.

London sport presented and gave a great review of how they’ve been using different methods to increase activity in London. Reflections that relate to a future discovery:

• they talked about how the images that accompany the sport really affected how many people would turn up. They tested multiple images and found ones that appeared to require skill to do the activity or if the sport was intense would put people off. People enjoying themselves tested far better.
• content issues. The term “bootcamp” was off putting and alternatives fared better.
• specific joining issues really helped. Such as where exactly do you meet (e.g. is it inside the building or outside), images also helped with this too.
• reminders and prompts helped reduce non-attendance. They talked about the frequency of notifications is important, once signed up people need to be reminded of the activity they have signed up for
• the work they did had a positive effect on knowing why people attended and did not attend. This informed their decisions on how the service should work and also the supply/demand of activities. Measuring is useful.

Also in an interesting venue!

Prepping discovery

Lots of this week and probably next will be orchestrating the beginning of the discovery. Lots of people, resources and tools to wrangle in place so we start with a good foundation. On Friday afternoon, out in the sunshine, armed with a bright orange notepad many tasks were noted down to tackle next week.

Find out more

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