Rebecca Howard, ShinyMind

“Where innovation sometimes goes wrong is that it isn’t co-designed,” explains Rebecca Howard, psychologist and founder of Shiny Mind, a digital mental health and wellbeing programme developed with the NHS. “I think we cut out co-design because it’s expensive, but we waste so much money trying to implement something that doesn’t work.

“Co-design with patients and clinicians is laborious, time-consuming, and you’ve got to absolutely be open to the fact that what you think is right could be complete rubbish,” she adds.

Originally developed to support NHS staff, Shiny Mind is now being prescribed for patients with anxiety and depression by GPs in Bedford, Luton and Milton Keynes. “They had a group of passionate clinicians who had used Shiny Mind for their own mental health and could see it would support their patients,” explains Howard.

Billed as “a hug in an app”, Shiny Mind offers range of wellbeing tools and masterclasses as an alternative to conventional treatments like in-person therapy and medication. There are separate editions for patients and NHS staff, and a new version for nursing and midwifery students has just been launched.

After retraining as a psychotherapist, former marketing executive Howard became interested in how therapy could be used in “a preventative, proactive way” rather than waiting until “people are falling down”. With initial funding from an angel investor network, the first version of Shiny Mind was co-created with staff at the NHS Walton Centre in Liverpool over the course of a year.

Although one-to-one therapy is still important — Howard still practices herself — “patients are more receptive to digital than we think they are. People increasingly want to access care in their own time and space,” she says.