Improving access to child and adolescent mental health services during the pandemic and beyond

Problem

Social restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic have increased mental health problems amongst young people. To address this issue, East Lancashire Children and Adolescent Services (ELCAS) developed a virtual drop-in clinic, whereby young patients and/or carers could access virtual consultations with a Mental Health Practitioner via a secure online platform. ELCAS wanted to seek feedback from patients regarding the service but found a low response rate to online

questionnaires sent out post-consultation. The aim of this quality improvement project was to improve the feedback system in order to better understand the patient experience, with a view to generating and developing new improvement

ideas.

Approach

After consulting key stakeholders, a change of process to directly contact patients or parents for feedback via telephone or email after the clinics was proposed. A guide was made for clinicians on how to ask for contact information at the end of their clinic. A team member contacted patients and parents to collect feedback using a questionnaire.

Findings

The number of responses increased by 220% and the aims of the project were met. Overall, feedback was positive and service users found the clinic to be beneficial. A key strength was good signposting. Recommendations to help improve the efficiency of the clinic were made. These included contacting local GPs to advertise the clinic, increasing the number of clinics, and starting a community drop-in clinic.

Consequences

The remote consultation model via the use of virtual drop-in clinics adopted by ELCAS has proven beneficial for children and adolescents in the East Lancashire region. This quality improvement project highlighted the efficiencies of using technology for providing mental health advice. This can be continued during the pandemic and beyond.