PERINATAL MENTAL HEALTH COMMUNITY AND INPATIENT DASHBOARDS

Case Study

The South London Mental Health and Community Partnership (SLP) is a collaborative of Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust, South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and South West London and St George’s Mental Health NHS Trust. Together, these trusts are responsible for providing inpatient and community mental health services to a population of 3.6 million.

The Challenge

SLP commissioned the NHS Transformation Unit to produce two dashboards – one for community-based services, the other for inpatient services.

Dashboards streamline performance reporting by bringing multiple metrics into a single location, facilitating faster decision making. They also allow users to group the data to explore the different facets within the dataset.

The purpose of the dashboards was to better understand the demands and performance of the Perinatal Mental Health Services and unify information from several separate reports into a single location.

Our Approach

We brought together a team with specialist analytical skills to extract and process data from the Mental Health Services Data Set (MHSDS). This allowed us to build the right metrics for each dashboard. We worked closely with the client , using our improvement expertise, to refine each dashboard into clearly readable metrics and interpretable insights.

The Outcome

Reproduceable Analytical Pipeline (RAP) – We developed a Community pipeline and an Inpatient pipeline that would extract, process and export MHSDS into the relevant metrics. The metrics could be easily uploaded into the Excel based dashboards. This allowed us to hand a repository of code to the client, allowing them to run and produce the data extracts needed to feed the dashboard in future months.

Community Dashboard – We developed a Community Perinatal Mental Health dashboard with tight adherence to the MHSDS publication rules. It reported a variety of Community based metrics at discrete monthly intervals, facilitated benchmarking to other providers, and allowed the service used to be compared to the wider population.

Figure 1 – Dummy data used to populate the headline page of the Community Dashboard

Figure 2 – Dummy data used to populate the demographic page of the Community Dashboard

Inpatient Dashboard – As with the Community Dashboard, we developed an Inpatient Perinatal Mental Health dashboard with tight adherence to the MHSDS publication rules and similar functionality. Inpatient metrics were reported in 12 month rolling intervals to ensure the data could be used to develop insights, and not be subject to small number suppression, in line with the publication rules.

Figure 3 – Dummy data used to populate the admission numbers the Inpatient Dashboard

Figure 4 – Dummy data used to populate the admissions broken down by Mental Health Act section in the Inpatient Dashboard

Legacy and Impact

The dashboards were accompanied by Processing Handover documents and access to a unique RAP to remotely access the relevant data warehouses and export the data into dashboard ready inputs. The dashboards were developed to accept the new inputs and automatically update, with minimal effort from the end user. This has allowed for a speedy update of these dashboards each month following the publication of new data.

The dashboards are used by the service leads to review activity, accessibility to patient groups, and review performance compared to other providers, and develop initiatives, where needed, in response to the data.

Our client highlighted provided the following feedback on our work.

“Not only was the product we commissioned delivered but the support documentation and hand over process was professional and robust. The team were a pleasure to work with, accommodating of all our requirements and communication was smooth and responsive.”

“This is the second dashboard that the team have produced for our programme of work and it was produced to the same high standard as the first. A pleasure to work with and I wouldn’t hesitate to commission them for future projects.”

Tracy Murray – Programme Director SLP Perinatal Provider Collaborative

Next Steps

If you are interested in this work, or would like to develop a dashboard to help manage your service, please get in touch via our website contact page. We have a team of analysts that are highly skilled in this type of work and would be happy to have an initial conversation.