Care Opinion's London Mental Health Event

As you may know, we recently organised a workshop style event, on October 10th in London. Our guests attended from a wonderfully diverse range of mental health service backgrounds, from providers to CCGs, healthwatches and charities.

If you know us, you know we like to keep everyone in the loop, so here's our wee blog to tell you all about the event! But if it’s an even shorter and sweeter summary you’re after, check out the fabulous Storify from the event that Rini Paul made

James kicked off the workshop with a warm welcome, a round of introductions and the gift of cake. Yes, we love cake, but more importantly, we love stories and at Care Opinion we see stories as gifts that keep on giving.

Once the cake is gone it's gone! But stories stick around and can inspire learning, changes (big or small) and most importantly, they are incredibly valuable but given freely.

Slides from James

Marika Cencelli delivered the keynote speech. She shared with us how she has used Care Opinion in her multiple roles, in her professional role, as a volunteer who supports people through their mental health care, and in her personal life. Marika explained that not only is Care Opinion a great source of information that can be used in her role when exploring and consulting on developing mental health care guidelines, but also for researching where you might want to receive your care.

Marika said that not only through reading stories that people share about a service, but (perhaps more importantly) the way that a service responds to those stories, is a very effective way of gaining understanding and insight into how that service operates. This knowledge can then help people decide if that service is one in which they feel confident in accessing for care and treatment.

The key message that really stood out in Marika’s speech was the way in which she clearly and insightfully explored the ways in which sharing a story on Care Opinion can be a therapeutic process. Telling a story enables you to get things off your chest, whether that is a heartfelt thanks or a perceived injustice, and receiving a response can often bring a much needed source of support and information, or even a sense of closure that could not be gained elsewhere.

On that note, we broke into small groups to discuss “how should stories be responded to?” Everyone was given a story to read from Care Opinion written by an anonymous service user who had posted about their mental health care experience. We then pulled all of our thoughts together and discussed what we felt should be included in a response, and have summarised our conclusions below:

Next up was Sara Kerry, Patient Experience Coordinator at West London Mental Health NHS Trust who was presenting on “How Care Opinion can be used across a range of mental health services”. Sara explained to the room how she took on the role of implementing the use of Care Opinion across her trust in a wide range of mental health care settings, from dementia services to inpatient wards, and IAPT services to high secure forensic services. Sara had some great advice for implementing Care Opinion across such a huge trust from first introducing Care Opinion to staff, to ensuring they are confident to respond to stories in the wonderfully empathetic way that they do.

Slides from Sara

Then it was time for a cake break!

I then took to the podium to tell everyone about our exciting new work with Talking Mats which we have now launched on our site. For a little background about our work with Talking Mats, here’s a blog we wrote a while back about the project and here’s an example story. Plus, my presentation slides talking-mats-presentation.pptx

Jane Danforth, involvement and experience officer at Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust then presented to the group about the ways the trust have worked to create an inclusive environment for feedback. Jane explained how her and the involvement team have worked hard to come up with new ways of ensuring that all patients and service users have access and the ability to share their story on Care Opinion. At Notts Healthcare they have not only given staff the ability, but the empowerment to read the stories and respond to them themselves in order to make real life changes. The ability for staff and patients alike to use Care Opinion as a real time vehicle for communication does result in real change that impacts patients lives. Here are Jane's slides jane-danforth-notts-oct-2017-v2.pptx

Tim and I then presented a selection of visualisations and reports showing how they can be used to aid quality improvement, learning, patient engagement and team management. You can see a selection of these reports and visualisations on our presentation slides here. visualisations-and-reports.pptx

Finally, it was back over to James to close the workshop with a discussion around next steps for Care Opinion, such as our projects with clinical teams, health and social care integration, site development and quality improvement.

Slides from James on new Care Opinion features

We’d like to thank everyone so much for coming along. We had a lovely time and you left us feeling more inspired than ever! If you were unable to attend but would like to know more about Care Opinion or hear about any of our upcoming events, just get in touch at info@careopinion.org.uk.