“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.
In a remarkable coup for the NHS, Alder Hey Hospital’s Kate Warriner has been voted the UK’s top digital chief by IT industry leaders. She tells Craig Ryan about what made the Liverpool kids’ hospital a technology powerhouse and why innovation and transformation is more about human beings than machines.
Managing AI responsibly will be one of the biggest challenges facing NHS managers in the coming decade. Governments are keen to ride the latest technological wave, but trust in AI varies wildly and big questions about governance and regulation remain unanswered, writes Craig Ryan.
The threat of potentially catastrophic cyber attacks on the NHS has increased “really dramatically” in recent weeks and is still “accelerating”, NHS England chief Sir Jim Mackey has said. His warning came just weeks after NHSE’s board was warned by its own digital experts that NHS job cuts posed an “unmitigated” risk to cybersecurity.
MiP’s annual event for workplace representatives, Reps Day, returns to Birmingham on 17-18 November. It’s an opportunity to meet fellow reps from across the country for a day of learning, networking and policy discussion.
MiP says regulation alone will not improve the NHS culture around raising and acting on concerns, following the findings of the Thirlwall Inquiry into the Lucy Letby case.
TUC Congress has backed a motion calling for an evidence-based and fully resourced plan for NHS management, with unions warning that cutting management capacity risks shifting essential work onto clinical teams.
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