What is the challenge your project is going to address and how does it connect to the theme of 'How can we improve across system boundaries?​

North Central London (NCL) Waiting Room is an NHS website designed to help everyone interested in young people’s mental health understand the options for wellbeing support.

This tool includes personalised account functionality which surfaces users’ needs. As a result, our database now houses a wealth of novel information about our users, including users’:

•  Preferred activities (what can help them feel better)
• Triggers (what can make them feel worse)
• Identity characteristics (>100 dimensions)
• Topics of interest
• Preferred formats (e.g., video, audio)
• Demographic details
• Favourited + liked resources
• Analytics data (how they use the website)

Having established the mechanism to continually gather these data from our 5-borough population, our challenge now is in routinely processing, presenting and disseminating these data in a meaningful way that drives an appetite for relevant quality improvement projects within front-line teams across our ICS and allows us to support the measurement of change through ongoing analytics.

What does your project aim to achieve?

We plan to develop a tailor-made data dashboard centred around user insights and service improvement, enabling effortless identification of patterns of need within different communities, gaps in provision and opportunities for improvement. With these insights surfaced centrally, our project seeks to develop engaging communication assets suitable for multiple communication channels, to allow us to routinely reach and secure the engagement of thousands of professionals across Health, Education, and the Voluntary Sector to drive meaningful QI work.

Primary aims:

• Driving learning
• Supporting focused action
• Changing service management behaviours
• Incentivising local problem solving
• Cascading outputs and good practice
• Creating cross-sector transparency and partnership working
• Building for massive scale and reach and delivering valuable tools for subsequent years

We seek to reduce waste by providing targeted insights to engaged partners, focusing on what works and iteratively improving our website to address population health needs, reducing inequalities with tailored data-driven content.

How will the project be delivered?

Our approach to this project is to shape on-the-ground action and empower individual services to problem solve and act based on the insights and data we provide.

We have a dedicated team already in place to take this work forward, who will deliver on the following items:

• Dashboard development using Tableau for insight generation and data visualisation
• Communication asset design enlisting creative communication specialists for maximum impact with partner agencies
• Commissioner report development to share population / system-level insights
• PPI consultation throughout all project stages, using a ‘You said, we did’ approach

We are closely aligned with the THRIVE Framework, which focuses on families’ mental health needs rather than severity or diagnosis. By surfacing needs-based and preference-sensitive data even before families’ first contact with the health system, this new analytics and communication capability will allow us to continually improve needs-based provision and deliver value for money at a system level.

How is your project going to share learning?

We will share learning through:

• the creation of a publicly-accessible multimedia blog detailing this work on the NCL Waiting Room website, to be updated quarterly
• dissemination of our learning with presentations or posters at regional QI events
• sharing our findings with the National i-THRIVE Community of Practice and the London i-THRIVE Community of Practice, both of which we are active members in
• sharing our insights and assets with others doing similar work in the Q community and with relevant external stakeholders
• sharing our dashboard development and data visualisation insights and configuration with the Q Community and relevant external stakeholders
• sharing transferable learnings via reports, workshops and presentations within the Q Community and with relevant stakeholders

While our initial product is aimed at the NCL ICS our ambition is to grow a regional and in time national network of interconnected Waiting Rooms able to share infrastructure, resources, learning and more.