NHSX and Mental Health Update 4

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…

Roadmap

We’ve been thinking about the ways we can visualise, at a high level, the road map for children and young people work. After some initial chats, we’ve started to plan out what that might look like - we started with a paper and pen sketch and have been evolving it since.

The main thing we wanted to communicate is the length of waiting times. To emphasise the importance of this, we went with a deliberately provocative design to create interest and discussion.

After a quick review we’ve decided that we’re going to work on a minimalist version that simply articulates the process, stay tuned as we’ll share once it becomes available!

Finding space

After some wrangling and diplomacy we’ve managed to secure a collaborative project space on the first floor of Skipton House. We’ve already made a start on the decorations, making the issues and the stakeholder map as visible as possible for NHSX and NHSE colleagues.

Mapping

A few of the squad got together to begin mapping this week. This will evolve as we learn more. Our first crack at it though was super thought provoking and absolutely fascinating head first dive into the problem.

We touched on:

• the family dynamic between children and parents and seeking help when experiencing a mental health episode
• the huge variation across the NHS on how care is delivered. From being referred to getting your first appointment with a Children and Young persons mental health professional anecdotally could be from 4 weeks to 2 years (will see if the data backs this up)
• the backstage processes the NHS conducts while they decide if a child or young person should be seen.

Agreeing inception tasks and start date

So we have a start date…

We begin on the 7th. That is the kick off day.

Pair of us have been knocking up what to do during the inception day, getting a brand new mental health slack workspace set up, getting a Trello board ready and all sorts of other jazzy tasks to try make the discovery start as smoothly as possible.

Inception day heavily influenced by Will Myddelton post about setting up a discovery team. Planned tasks with team include:

• context of how we got here
• reaching consensus on agreed ways of working
• sharing what we think we know so far, so we all start from the same foundation
• consensus on rabbit holes and icebox-ing ideas so can be focus and open on the problem at hand
• discussion on comms and stakeholders
• some homework about writing out ‘discovery is done…’ acceptance criteria.

Stakeholder mapping

Some mapping of stakeholders took place, taking inspiration from the agile team onion. We’ve got it on a wall, seeking more input and evolving already.

Aspiration is to display it where the majority of the other policymakers outside the team sit. Want them to see some of the artefacts we are already producing and allow for them to both contribute and ask questions of why we work the way we do.

Compiling research

The team has no aspiration to duplicate existing research so we are doing the dirty work and bringing together all we can find and asking others for links to relevant research.

Here are a few things we’ve already found:

• “Despite so many children needing support, only 1 in 4 young people with a mental disorder reported accessing specialist mental health services in the previous year.” Source
• “Disorders were more common among children living in lower income households and children whose parents were in receipt of low-income benefits.” Source
• “Children who had a mental disorder were twice as likely to have been bullied or cyberbullied in the previous year” Source
• average Do Not Attend (DNA) rate in children and young people’s mental health is 10.2%. Source
• In 2016 they calculated that each DNA costs about £290 of a CAMHS professionals time. Source

Also repeated shout out to the team doing mental health design patterns once more. I have shared your efforts with a big search engine company.

Find out more

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