Outcome Measures in Children & Young People’s Mental Heath: Weeknotes 3 —11.02.22

What have we been doing?

• Research ethics: One of our actions from the safeguarding checklist we completed last week was to complete a light-touch research ethics review. We’ve finalised our first draft of this, and it’s gone out for clinical and research review next week.
• More recruitment: Recruitment of young people and parents / carers kicked off in earnest this week. We had a check-in meeting with the ROMs Champions group on Wednesday, and agreed the group will ask each clinician to ask a specific number of young people. This should give us a better idea of our recruitment return rates, and whether we need to go down any other recruitment avenues.
• Stakeholder interviews and desk research: This week, we’ve held four more interviews with stakeholders, and had the time to really get stuck into the secondary research papers. We’re beginning to put the pieces together and identify some promising lines of enquiry for our user research. We’ll keep doing this next week, and bring our initial thoughts along to the Discovery Workshop on the 21st Feb. Let us know if you’d like to have some input into that and we’ll send over an invite.

Things that went well

• We’ve got 12 professionals who are happy to take part in our research, covering all the perspectives we hoped for. Kate is working her way through getting interview slots booked in around year-end and half-term annual leave!
• We made a lot of really useful decisions at last Monday’s check-in meeting. The big ones were around our safeguarding approach and the support we’ll offer to young people and parents / carers after the research sessions. The conversation felt open and productive, and although there were a few different perspectives at the start we ended up with an approach which integrated these into something everyone was happy with. Not bad for an hour’s meeting!

3 things we’ve learnt

We’ve learnt a lot this week. Here are three interesting nuggets from desk research and stakeholder interviews, which we’d like to explore further in our research with staff, young people and parent/carers:

• There’s a lot being done well already. Where do examples of effective and creative uses of ROMs already exist? How can we share them more widely?
• Time in training sessions to think about how to introduce ROMs to young people was seen as helpful. The same was true for time to think about the best way to use them in supervision. Role play, group work and case studies were requested from follow-up sessions — this suggests that there may be good appetite for using ROMs, but low confidence. How can we increase that confidence?
• Harrogate have co-produced a ROMs tool with young people. What does this look like? How did they run the co-design process? What can we learn from it?

Challenges we’re working on

• The team are balancing their time spent doing research admin — creating and amending flyers and screeners, filling in and safeguarding approach actions— with their time interviewing experts and reading existing research. We need to make sure we’re doing things the right way, but it’s important to make sure that’s not at the expense of knowledge that’ll help inform the rest of the project. Luckily, Helen (a user researcher at Mace & Menter) joins the project team next week. Now the bulk of the admin is done, she will have some uninterrupted time to spend understanding what’s already known about ROMs in CAMHS and picking up the final stakeholder interviews.
• Recruitment of young people and parents / carers is progressing slowly — we’ve had just two responses to our screener, and one of them wasn’t eligible due to never having completed an outcome measure questionnaire. We’ve put some more structure and follow up around this, and we’ll check in on how well that’s working on Monday to agree whether a different approach is needed.