NHSX and Mental Health 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) from team members working on a discovery into children, young people and mental health…

Mapping

Team members mapping the end to end user journey of a young person seeking care and support on a big piece of brown paper using colourful post it notes We spent some time this week physically mapping out the user journeys for children and young people, parents and clinicians.

Although we are focussing on the waiting period from referral to treatment, it’s essential we look at a person-centred end to end experience so that we can understand all of the potential pain points for users, look at the range of channels and services a user may interact with and identify any gaps in our knowledge for user research questions.

Our intention is to find a space near colleagues so they can see and contribute to what we have so far.

User research first participant

We researched remotely with a parent of a child who had experienced waiting for mental health support this week. Our first bit of user research, more analysis to do after future sessions. Much more research lined up.

User research preparation

Lots of decisions and actions to recruit and setup research in future weeks. It isn’t glamorous but every single discovery is filled with people getting their hands dirty prepping for research.

Fortunately efforts are coming together and we have a lot more visits and research sessions in the calendar. Next week we should be up in the North-West and down to the South-West for research (see below if you want to get in touch with us about more research!) with some remote sessions coming up too.

We'd like to talk to clinical and non-clinical CAMHS staff on how we can support children and young people waiting to access NHS mental health services.

Email us at digitalresearch@nhsx.nhs.uk

Find out more about this work: https://t.co/adIDzmrYMc @SophieAnnRankin

— NHSX (@NHSX) August 22, 2019

Getting Artefacts

Through contacts provided by NHS England colleagues, we’ve connected with the CYMPHS team at Norfolk and Suffolk Foundation Trust. They’ve sent us with a whole range of (anonymised) templates, forms and letters used for communicating with children, young people and parents.

It’s really important to review the existing processes and artefacts that exist in this space. For instance better content design can have a real impact on a service and, if needed, then suggesting tweaks to artefacts is worthwhile as it could create a better version of the service.

We’ve arranged a form of content crit on the artefacts we are receiving to better evaluate if they could be improved given the needs we are uncovering during the discovery.

Quantitative Evidence

As we’ve been researching we’ve found some really interesting quantitative evidence about CYP mental health, waiting times and did not attend/was not brought rates. Often we get multiple answers from multiple sources which go some way to answering our questions. This week we had a first pass at consolidating what we have and trying to settle on the most recent, trustworthy answers or accepting a range of answers.

By the current count, we have 38 questions that seem more likely to be answered via quantitative means. We have answers for about 50% of them. More work to be done and fingers crossed more answers spurs more questions.

User research questions vote & discussion about methods to test with CYP

This week we had a great team discussion over;

Here is a sample of some of the questions we came up with during the session;

Methodology

As we are researching with children and young people we have been stretching ourselves to think of the best way to extract meaningful insights from participants. The subject is extremely sensitive and we aren’t optimistic that rehashing standard methods will work perfectly.

Instead we are working on something similar to a storyboard for participants to fill out and express their experience (not wholly dissimilar to the act of using art/play in therapy). It allows for more creativity and freedom of expression and we are hoping that it is easier for someone to document then being asked to share personal experiences directly with an adult they do not know in a potentially unfamiliar setting. We may even use emojis to elicit reflections on their experience.

We’ve essentially prototyped a first version and asked people with more experience of working with children and young people to give input. We’ve got some improvements to make.

Where to get extra help

We began research this week with parents but prior to doing so we wanted to make sure that we were not putting people at risk by bringing up potentially traumatic experiences. We aren’t clinicians and sadly aren’t equipped to offer bespoke assistance but we can signpost to other services.

Thankfully we have NHS.UK to help us here and could re-use a fair bit from their advice. We added a few extra resources that are parent-specific from Young Minds and the Anna Freud centre.

Meeting people working in mental health booking/communications space

A quick but interesting chat was had with two people currently working with trusts to improve communication to patients and make booking easier.

Some reflections:

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!