Home   Patient Flow  FlowModels  Percept   World Class Commissioning  Breast Screening  Simulation Tools
Mental Health  18 Weeks  'Lean Thinking'  Bed Management  Client Comments  More About Us  Contact Us  

Brief Interventions

The Mental Health care pathways below only document the initial experience and expections for one Primary Care Trust (PCT) in its pursuit to Improve Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) for its patients. It is not required that your particular environment shares their experience and Patient demands. Therefore, all of these pathways are variable to reflect local needs/expectations.

Brief Interventions offers Patients a range of Psychological Therapies that may be appropriate to their condition, the most commonly known being CBT (Cognitive Behaviour Therapy) and they are usually delivered as a Course of Therapy Sessions spread over a number of weeks.

CBT and other Psychological Therapies are not, however, readily available across the NHS inspite of advocacy by NICE (National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence) and most significant advisory bodies. We therefore use our PatientFlows to better understand our demand / capacity constraints and design Commissioning solutions which allow this demand to be met.

Brief Interventions are far more complex than the initial recognition and this is shown below.

Now, we must consider a whole list of different Psychological Therapies to be provided and we must also be concerned with the Skill-mix of our Staff, their availability to deliver those skills for the benefit of our Patients, and whether we ought to utilise external providers (Free-or-Fee?).

We are also faced with a lot more variation in both demand and delivery. For example, our PatientFlow drawing includes a MayBe7% probability that CBT Patients will need an extended course of 12 Sessions rather than the more usual 6 Sessions and this is re-stated in the Notes in the screenshot below.

Further, we can also define the likely Period of delivery for each Patient. In the image below it is a Minimum of 4 Weeks, a Maximum of 7 Weeks, but Most Likely to be 6 Weeks. Statistically, this is called a Triangular Distribution and most Users find this kind of data relatively easy to provide.

Likewise, the Therapy Dialog also allows us to allocate Time Slots during which CBT appointments may be made. Here, we've defined them as being between 2pm and 6pm.

More data about Staff Shifts and Patient Arrival times can be stored in the Clock icons via integrated MS Excel templates. The green connectors linking staff with Therapies also tell us about specific staff involvement on this Therapy.

So we now see how these visually comprehensible drawings are holding data concerned with what needs to be done, who should do it and when, how long it should take as well as key facts and Notes which are helpful to the staff involved and are of great benefit when introducing and training new staff.

OPTIMISED RESOURCES : GREATER PATIENT CARE