Background
Voluntary and community sector organisations, like all service providers, need good quality data to help them manage and understand the therapeutic services they provide. The introduction of the innovative new Children and Young People’s Wellbeing Practitioner (CWP) role has presented both opportunities and challenges in data collection for these organisations. CWPs provide focused, evidence-based interventions in the form of low intensity support and guided self help to young people demonstrating mild to moderate anxiety and low mood. They’re trained to embed CYP IAPT principles in their work, including the use of clinically meaningful outcome measures.
The challenge
CWPs’ training requires them to use tools and systems that support them both to set goals with young people and to use questionnaires with them to track progress and outcomes. CWPs also need to be able to embed this data within their services so that they can report to commissioners, funders and the national data set. However the organisations employing CWPs are often reliant on paper forms and spreadsheets to record and manage data. In the south west, CWP training is provided by the South West CYP IAPT Collaborative team at the University of Exeter. In 2017, we aspired to embed a patient management system to support the first cohort of CWPs in their training and practice with young people in schools, youth centres and other community settings.
The system
We chose iaptus CYP because it’s a full patient management system that meets the needs of our training programme and because it supports our clinical supervision of trainees’ caseloads. It’s a cloud-based system that was originally designed by Mayden to support psychological therapy teams in CAMHS settings, and we were able to adapt it for use in early intervention services in community and school settings. The system collects the data required for national reporting to the Mental Health Service Data Set (MHSDS) and supports practitioners to set goals with young people, enter ROMS in-session and give immediate feedback on progress. We trained and supported the CWPs to use iaptus CYP and were able to input to their ongoing use of the system once they completed their training and returned to their organisations.
One of the key benefits of iaptus CYP is that it is accessible wherever there is an internet connection. This flexibility was fundamental to our success, with practitioners working across a number of settings enabling improved access to support for children, young people and families.
Key learning, outcomes and impact
Working closely with each service to understand their relationship with data and how they were using it was very helpful in this project. Some of the services were primarily concerned with reporting to commissioners, others with showing the impact of their work for funding purposes, while the priority for others was supervising practitioners and managing clinical risk.
In 12 months of implementing iaptus CYP with the first cohort of CWPs we have learnt:
- CWPs are able to use session by session monitoring effectively with young people, inputting data directly into questionnaires during sessions using tablets and/or laptops.
- Use of ROMS is central to the CWP’s role and we used the following questionnaires: RCADS, GBO’s, ORS/CORS, SFQ, SDQ, BP-SES, ODDp, ESQ.
- Mapping a generic care pathway that was common across services helped us to standardise data collection in iaptus CYP and provide an initial template to support implementation. Services could then develop these pathways according to local need.
- A system that enables supervision of CWPs’ caseloads is vital in order to manage clinical risk and support caseload management. iaptus CYP supports this by enabling practitioners and supervisors to clearly see caseload detail and enables clinical prioritisation.
- For the first time, services in our area were able to collect and report data against the MHSDS using data extracted from iaptus CYP. This has been a challenge, partly due to the costs and logistics for them in establishing an N3 connection in order to upload data. However, local solutions have been found and costs are likely to be reduced with the introduction of the new SDCS in April 2019.
- Cost can be a significant barrier to adopting a patient management system for smaller organisations and our approach gave providers a chance to see the benefit of their practitioners using iaptus CYP before committing to buy the system. Mayden was then able to structure a group offer to multiple small providers to make it more affordable.
Next steps
As a result of introducing CWPs trained in routine collection of data, nine community providers involved in the first cohort of CWP training are now adopting iaptus CYP to support the low intensity and wider wellbeing teams within their services in education and community settings. They include Young Devon, CYP-Accept Clinic, Young People Cornwall, Wellspring Counselling in Bristol, Young Somerset and South West Family Values.
Find out more
Visit www.swcypiapt.com to learn more about the CWP programme in the south west.
To find out more about how iaptus CYP is supporting voluntary and community sector organisations to collect MHSDS data and use ROMS, please contact Helen Barnes helen.barnes@mayden.co.uk or visit www.iaptus.co.uk