In our latest interview in the series we speak with Caroline Palmer, ChatHealth Digital Development Clinical Lead at Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust (LPT) to find out more about ChatHealth and future developments.
Tell us about ChatHealth and the inspiration behind starting the service and what is the mission behind it?
Developed by LPT, ChatHealth is a messaging service that puts service users in touch with healthcare professionals. It supports healthcare teams provide services to many more people.
Back in 2012, my colleagues and I at LPT recognised we needed to change the way we interacted with service users, especially young people and millennial parents. The use of smartphones in our society is increasing prolific; 94 per of children own one by the age of 15 (Ofcom, 2020) and messaging is the most popular way for people to digitally communicate with friends and family (Ofcom, 2012). Young people told us they wanted to be able to communicate discreetly, without fear of judgement. Parents and carers said they struggled to get in touch or worried about wasting professionals’ time.
We initially examined several off-the-shelf solutions, however, we could not find one that fulfilled all our requirements, so we went ahead with developing ChatHealth, our own bespoke web-based messaging platform to receive and respond to text messages.
After successfully piloting large-scale messaging services for young people to reach school nurses in Leicestershire, we soon received interest from other NHS and healthcare organisations seeking to solve the same problem, this was closely followed by the provision of a messaging service for parents and carers to communicate with health visitors.
What challenges have you encountered along the way?
Safely managing clinical risk was one of the challenges faced. To overcome this, a robust safety model was built with specialists including front-line practitioners, safeguarding and information governance leads, teacher and governors, professional bodies (e.g. RCN), third-sector bodies (e.g. NSPCC) and – perhaps most significantly – the police. This level of involvement and learning still underpins the safety protocols embedded into every new user team today.
Successfully engaging staff is another challenge often faced. The move to working digitally sometimes pushes healthcare professionals outside of their comfort zones and can feel a like a daunting prospect.
Are there any cases that you can speak about that you are proud of being involved in?
Around 50 NHS Trusts and healthcare organisations have replicated the same well-evidenced clinical model to ensure the delivery of safe and secure messaging communications across a range of services, including school nursing, health visiting, sexual health, perinatal mental health and young people’s mental health teams.
The solution is now available to more than 2.2 million young people, the parents of carers of 1.6 million children, including 111 thousand new-born babies born each year across England and Wales.
How does ChatHealth work within the NHS?
ChatHealth has been developed as a risk-managed, web-based platform to enable healthcare professionals to respond to incoming messages. It’s promoted to local populations via traditional printed promotional materials and digital communications such as social media and websites. For school nursing, this could include posters in schools, business cards and pens. For health visiting, stickers on children’s personal health records (red books) are an effective way to promote the service.
Service users can send a message, anonymously if they wish to, from their mobile phones to the service’s dedicated number and they receive an automated reply, acknowledging receipt, likely response times and terms of service, as well as directing users to alternative sources of help, if urgent help is required.
ChatHealth provides central inboxes on a secure online portal, helping health teams to share responsibility for conversations and ensure no messages are missed. A duty system is generally used to manage all incoming messages, and alerts are received by staff when new messages arrive. Health professionals can then respond to incoming messages using ChatHealth. We work with health teams to adhere to a standard operating procedure and provide them with training on how to the system to respond to messages. All conversations are stored and documented in line with national and local data-protection and record-keeping guidelines, whether contact is
Has there been an increase in users during Covid-19?
Greater demand during COVID-19 has led to a record number of new messaging helplines implemented across the nation during the first few months of the pandemic.
Eleven new ChatHealth messaging services were launched in various localities nationwide between April and July 2020. This means that as many new implementations of ChatHealth messaging services went live in the initial months of the pandemic as there was in the previous full year (April 2019 – March 2020).
During the COVID-19 pandemic, ChatHealth has proven to be an extremely useful service for service users. As a virtual service, ChatHealth has enabled health professionals to reach vulnerable people dealing with issues exacerbated by COVID-19. Nationally, we saw an increase in ChatHealth users, the amount of incoming messages rose by 50% and the range of reasons why young people are wanting mental health support has increased with service users expressing worries or concerns exacerbated by COVID-19.
What is in the pipeline for 2020?
Our plans for the future of ChatHealth is to achieve ubiquitous spread of the safe and secure messaging platform to support young people, children and families with opportunities to work with public health, young people’s mental health, perinatal mental health and adult’s mental health services.
Our product development also continues with a new instant messaging app being launched later in 2020.
