What is the challenge your project is going to address and how does it connect to the theme of 'How can improvement be used to reduce delays accessing health and care services'?

STOMP (Stopping Overmedication of people with a Learning Disability, Autism or both) is an important national agenda because it can improve a person’s quality of life by reducing side-effects of psychotropic medications and benefit physical health and improve the quality of life of a person’s families/carers and help them to manage the person’s care better at home. STOMP works on the principle of minimum effective medication dosage.

Sheffield Health and Social Care NHS Foundation Trust’s (SHSC) Learning Disability service is currently undergoing transformation and focusing on improving the quality of care, with a focus on evidence-based practices that improve quality of life, such as STOMP. To implement changes successfully, we must work with key partners in the integrated care system and beyond. This project will use a multi-disciplinary approach to improve awareness and use of STOMP across the South Yorkshire ICS with healthcare professionals, service users, carers and implementation specialists.

What does your project aim to achieve?

This project aims to implement STOMP across the region using interventions that will be co-produced and grounded in implementation theory. Implementation theory highlights that to normalise changes into practice, people must understand why the change is necessary. We want to bring STOMP to life by using Quality Improvement (QI) tools to develop appropriate training, coaching and a dedicated website/app.

Each aspect of the materials will be co-created with service users and carers. This will help everyone to better understand the need for STOMP from a service users’ perspective. For example, the map below shows the journey of a person with a Learning Disability. By listening to their carers, it became apparent that there were issues with language barriers, which were overcome through a clinician’s multilinguistic skills and understanding of the person’s cultural background, combined with translating STOMP information into multiple languages.

How will the project be delivered?

The project will be delivered by a multidisciplinary team including a consultant psychiatrist, Data Analyst, QI and implementation specialists and service users, all of whom are passionate about improving the lives of people with a Learning Disability.

The multi-disciplinary team will combine data from service users, carers and process measures to create a range of materials that will be shared through training, coaching and the website/app. The stories will include data such as days between contact that has been made for service users, as we have already seen that improving understanding of STOMP can help to appropriately reduce the amount of support required from the Learning Disability team, as support can be gained sooner from colleagues in other organisations, such as social workers, to be involved with STOMP interventions. We will capture feedback continuously to understand how STOMP implementation can continuously be improved and scaled up successfully.

How is your project going to share learning?

This project is all about generating knowledge, learning together, understanding how STOMP can be implemented successfully and how it actually improves quality of life for individual people. We want to share a wealth of examples of how STOMP improves peoples’ lives and understand what changes can be made to make STOMP more accessible.

This information will be analysed using implementation theory and results will be shared though improvement networks, e.g. Q and specialist networks, Royal College of Psychiatrists’ Intellectual Disability Faculty, so that we can help everyone nationally that are trying to make similar changes.

The process maps and improvement data generated will be regularly shared. For example, charts of time between contacts to the service related to side effects may be monitored to show improvements as STOMP is used for individual patients.

We will provide updates on the Q website, including links to progress, e.g. process maps and data.