East Midlands Mental Health Commissioning Network

What I would do with the website if it were mine to build

Terri Eynon

Big bold statements of intent

Are we doing what we know works?
Every defect is a treasure
If this service were working how would we know?

Subsections with titles that use straightforward language

The language is important – polysyllables obfuscate – short words get to the point quicker. There can be no room for the kind of cleverness that says to GPs ‘but you really don’t understand what we are trying to do here....’

What works?

A section for the evidence base, links to papers evaluating stuff we know is effective.

How do we measure?

A section where we establish a set of Network-wide measures so we can establish benchmarking eg CORE-OM, RecoveryStar etc

We could also share things like standardised staff evaluation questionnaires, user satisfaction surveys. If we can begin to agree common measures then we can start benchmarking (see below)

Who is measuring and what?

A section listing organisations and individuals who are already involved in evaluation and linking to their websites

SUCRAN – the service user and carer research and audit network at De Montfort
The Eating Disorders department at Loughborough Uni
CLAHRCs
etc

What are we doing?

Where we put up narratives about services that we are offering and how we are measuring them with the idea that the Network is there to critically evaluate our evidence so far and begin to move towards benchmarking of similar interventions (see below)

What would we like to do?

Where we post our commissioning intentions up for discussion – with the aim of seeing how we can move towards benchmarking with similar services (see below)

Is my service as good as I think it is?

A section for benchmarking – which will have subsections for particular types of intervention

Is my IAPT as good as I think it is?
Is my primary care mental health facilitator service as good as I think it is?
Is my rehab service as good as I think it is?
Etc

Each of these sections will have a development line – and each of these needs to be led by someone for whom this area is a passion.

IAPT is easy to start off – we already have KPIs. That gives us some nice comparable numbers.

We also have data on costs.

Mike McHugh has already written a big paper for Leicestershire comparing Good Thinking with its neighbours.

But we also have very different ways of delivering the same idea. We need some qualitative analysis first – to establish what the main differences are – before we can tabulate this. For example, Leicestershire is highly CBT, very PWP oriented, works in practices. Lincoln (I think) is more psychologist led, works in hubs...

A mature benchmarking site would have a clear set of comparative data. So, in rehab for example – how many rehab beds per population is an area of interest. We might want to look at how long people stay in service – and what care cluster they are at according to HoNOS.

All this data is out there – and it will be commissioning managers who have a problem they need to solve who will have the passion to drag the data out for comparision.

PbR

I am not entirely sure yet how this discussion fits into the above. I am a clinician. I need to know what a commissioning manager would want on this site to support this. But I would see that as developing from the mature benchmarking area – so we are beginning to pay providers more for good practice than for complacency[SFH1].

[SFH1]1 We could compare numbers of patinets allocated to each care clusters as a starter. Also what is the split between community and inpatinets. We could also compare what are we paying for each cluster. Also over time get a sense of how much movement there is across clusters.