Outcome Measures in Children & Young People’s Mental Heath: Weeknotes 4–18.02.22

Slightly delayed weeknote publishing from week before last on our project!

What have we been doing?

• Research ethics checklist: Reviewing the current draft and just clarifying anything outstanding.
• More recruitment: Almost all of the professionals are now booked in. Recruitment of young people and parents / carers has kicked off but a bit of confusion about the deadline, which has now been clarified. We discussed in the Monday meeting that going via the ROMs Champions is the best route so not pursuing social or letters for now, though I’m also going to contact the Parent Forums in Bristol, North Somerset and South Glos. The next check in and decision on whether to push the research back is 24 February at the ROMs Champions meeting (NB: moved from 23 February to accommodate annual leave).
• Stakeholder interviews and desk research: Helen, a user research in Mace & Menter, joined the project and has been getting up to speed with the interviews and research to date. By the end of the week we will have spoken to all the stakeholders. We’ve also started planning the Discovery Workshop for 21 February which will help us gather more input from key people on our project team.
• YP email comms approved: Thanks Barbara!

Things that went well

• We’ve booked in 11 of the 12 professionals for the first research week — w/c 28 February and 7 March.
• The conversation about appropriate methods of recruitment was really useful and made it clearer that the focus, for now, needs to be with the ROMs Champions group and anything we can do to support them.
• It’s been helpful to have our additional Mace & Menter team member, Helen start this week whilst Kat’s on holiday. Allowing us to carry on full steam and have Helen run the final stakeholder interviews to help with her knowledge and onboarding!

Things we’ve learnt

• How important it is to make sure when reaching out to YP we do so in an appropriate way — contacting them by text for example could then lead them to think that’s a support route if they are ever in need.
• That the results of recruiting via Social Media are likely to be so broad that it’s not the best route, and our focus should be the ROMs Champions.
• As this is a paused week we’ve mostly been reviewing the existing research and previous stakeholder interviews, but watch this space for next week after the Discovery Workshop and concept check in!

Challenges we’re working on

• Recruitment is the main priority — we’ve now had just three responses to our screener, and one of them wasn’t eligible due to never having completed an outcome measure questionnaire. Next week we’ll be looking at the impact this could have on project timings, and also whether a different recruitment approach or change to our planned scope could help.
• Handover planning: I’m moving roles in a couple of weeks’ time, so we’re finalising details around handover . Within the NHS teams working on this project this is going to mean splitting my role between a colleague in Digital and a Mental Health Programme Manager, due to capacity. Having been involved since the EOI and bid stage to NHSE/X, I’ll be sad to not see the project through to the end with the rest of the team!