A new national outcomes metric is being introduced that will see all children and young people’s mental health services collecting and reporting in a routine way against the outcome measures they are presently using.
The Five Year Forward View for Mental Health identified that by 2020/21 there should be ‘national metrics to support improvements in children and young people’s mental health outcomes’ and that ‘all services should routinely collect and publish outcomes data’.
NHS England has been overseeing the introduction of the new national outcomes metric during a shadow go-live year, with data collected via the Mental Health Services Data Set (MHSDS) and shared only within the NHS. From April 2020, NHS Digital will make services’ outcome data publicly available.
The metric is not introducing a new measurement tool, instead services will select the most appropriate outcome measure for their populations from the range of measures already in the MHSDS. This gives clinicians the flexibility to choose from a suitable patient reported outcome measure, parent and carer reported outcome measure, clinician report outcome measure or goal based outcome measure.
Paired outcomes are essential to understanding the benefit that children and young people are experiencing from services. The national metric draws on two observations on a specific measure. NHS England’s focus is on closed referrals, with at least one face to face contact, two clinical contacts, assessment above clinical cut-off, and paired scores. They are also looking at reliable change between the first and last scores.
CORC is supporting outcome focussed commissioning in child and youth mental health, and is offering phone consultations to commissioners to answer questions they have. Read more on the CORC website.
iaptus CYP supports therapists to collect and report outcomes during therapy sessions. Questionnaires on measures in the MHSDS, such as CORS and RCADS, are optimised for use with children and their families with results automatically updated within the patient record. These can be shared with the young person in therapy sessions.
Find out more about iaptus CYP by requesting a system demo. You’ll learn about the system’s features plus gain a clear understanding of how the software can be used to collect outcome measures in session and monitor progress across sessions.
