NHSX and Mental Health Update 5
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…
Photo of team
Inception day
Wednesday 7th of August marked day 1 of the Discovery.
We had a long list of tasks to do but got through them with a few minutes to spare.
Selection of tasks (some post-it's floated elegantly to the floor) at our inception workshop yesterday. Partly inspired from @myddelton blog post on setting up a discovery. pic.twitter.com/ILe7r1uiMX
— Colin Pattinson (@ColinPattinson) 8 August 2019
Some activities that went down:
- Where has this work come from?
- Reminder of the problem to solve
- Reminder of what is a discovery
- Draw yourself team activity
- Agreement on ways of working/ceremonies
- Holidays/times available for team
- Tools we’d use
- General orders
- Goals of team
- Overview of who we think the users are
- Go through what we know so far from our draft service map
- Review of what data we have so far
- Discussion on rabbit holes (what things could we spend time on but would lead to lots of wasted time)
- Ideas to icebox (letting people get any ideas out of their system before we delve any deeper into the problem)
- Explain how we intend to communicate with stakeholders (show and tells + weekly updates)
- Review stakeholder map (who we have, who is missing, what comms is best for people)
- ‘Discovery is done when…’ statements set as homework (essentially acceptance criteria for the end of discovery)
One team member was off having a well deserved break but we look forward to his input on his return.
Aspirations
We did a team activity to write the 3 things we are excited to learn more about during the discovery. They were…
- To find something I did not expect
- To learn about how services are designed & delivered for children and young people (CYP)
- To learn more about product management and user research
- Generate solutions for CYP and those who are waiting
- Using ethical design
- Extend our understanding of the experiences of CYP waiting to be seen
- How family dynamics affect mental health care and support
- How to integrate existing mental health design patterns
- Designing for children instead of adults
- How services are delivered in the NHS
- The experiences (thoughts, feelings, emotions) of users in this space
- The best way to research with children and young people (what approaches work)
- To know how to develop a product and business case
- To know how to design for a problem
- What data is available for work on/around mental health
- What existing mental health interventions are available
- The underlying causes of CYP do not attend rates
- The design considerations for mental health services
First ceremonies
As a team we have agreed to commit to:
- Daily stand-ups
- Show and tells
- Retrospectives
- Sprint planning
- Making time to sit with and work alongside children and young people mental health colleagues
- Publish weekly updates at the start of each week
A few of those are happening in the first few days. We have successfully been cranking through daily stand-ups, so far never surpassing the 10 minute mark. We’ve had our first planning session and have got a nice list of tasks for the next 2 weeks. Priorities include prepping for user research, compiling existing research and compiling services in the children and young people space. We’ve begun sticking up stakeholder maps in the area where NHS England colleagues sit. We’ve made it jumbo sized and got some explainers plus asking people to add to what we already have.
Dividing tasks and finding research
Lots of activity in compiling existing research and splitting off tasks and responsibilities. We’ve got a bulging folder full of things to read for next week and share back to one another.
Let’s talk about users
With our discovery question in mind “What are the opportunities to support children and young people in preparation for their first or subsequent contact from a NHS funded mental health service?”…
We held a session to start thinking about all of the people using (or affected by) this. There are primary users such as children and young people as well as parents and guardians, healthcare professionals and teachers.
We brainstormed all the things that might affect how people experience the service. This includes things like stage of the journey, family situation, age, condition. Some of this was aided by having some evidence we had already compiled about children and young people most at risk. This helps when it comes to refining our research goals and who we want to target in the research.
In this session, we agreed our approach to recruitment and planned how we will reach out to networks to find participants. It’s important to reach out through wider channels and screen against specific criteria.
We’re looking for:
- Children between the ages of 8-25 who are either: currently waiting for care or have recently waited for care
- Parents of children in the categories above
- Health professionals delivering mental health services in the NHS (including CAMHS staff, GPs, staff booking appointments etc.)
If you can help please contact digitalresearch@nhsx.nhs.uk to find out more.
The next step is to:
- Define our discovery research goals
- Start booking in participants
- Preparing for our first round of research
Find out more
If you want to stay informed about wider NHSX work then check out @NHSX on Twitter.
If you want to give us feedback or get in touch with the team then you can do so using this form!