Mental Health Services and Covid-19 — Niche Consult

Understanding the impact on capacity and demand

Mental health services need now to be planning their capacity requirements for the coming year — inpatient beds, community teams, referrals and caseloads.

All of this has been made both more important, and more difficult, by the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. We know that services are seeing:

• increases in demand arising directly from the outbreak, for example presentations related to depression, anxiety, or (in the longer-term) PTSD
• increases in demand indirectly caused by the outbreak, for example acute presentations of psychosis related to missed medication.
• reductions in demand related to the outbreak, for example continuing reductions in presentations to A&E, or to health services more generally.
• changes in supply responses, for example greater use of telemedicine, but also higher levels of staff sickness/absence.
• opportunities arising from intended national prioritisation of mental health services as part of recovery from Covid-19.

How do you build all of this into a new capacity and demand plan for your mental health services?

Niche can work with you to model all the various potential scenarios — and to plan robustly for what you should do next. We’ll help you to take account of:

• all of your different patient groups — by age, sex, diagnosis, service offer
• all of the flow metrics: patterns of referral, patterns of care and treatment, lengths of episodes, caseloads and staff utilisation
  your options for modes of working: telephone, video-call, direct face-to-face
• your local experience of the pandemic — where you’re seeing more or less demand than expected. Local experiences are very different, and simply using national data is much less useful
• How services can be configured to offer the best fit between demand and capacity — and feasible buffers for periods of peak demand
• Short-term changes to make now — and longer-term changes which you should begin to plan for

Niche have worked on many mental health modelling projects across the country. We can therefore bring both technical expertise (using discrete event simulation) and a wealth of informal knowledge of how other services have been addressing these questions.

Our simulation modelling will ensure that the full range of variation in your real patient flows is captured, and that options for the future service model allow you to understand the risks and benefits of each approach.

Originally published at https://www.nicheconsult.co.uk.