This week, Mindwave staff travelled to Liverpool to meet up with clients from Cheshire and Merseyside ICS at the Silver Birch Maternal Mental Health Launch event at the Florrie in Liverpool.
Taking place during Cheshire and Merseyside Baby Week, it was apt timing for us to engage in ‘A Day of Collaboration & Conversation’ with clients, collaborators and NHS maternity services staff from around the region.
The day itself was a wonderful series of talks, reflections and shared experiences, delivered with care and passion by some of the regions patients, maternity health pioneers and thought leaders, specifically around the issues encountered when treating patients experiencing mental health episodes connected to childbirth. This included:
- Merseyside Local Maternity & Neonatal System
- Lead and Specialist Midwives, Consultants, Psychologists and Psychological Therapists
- Specialist Health Visitors & Peer Support Workers
- Academics from Manchester University
- Mersey Care Chief Nurses & Executives
The auditorium was filled with a tangible sense of purpose as delegates empathised with the stories told, and connected with each other to formulate plans to improve patient maternity related mental health experiences and outcomes.
During the breaks, Mindwave joined Project managers and service administrators from Infomatics Merseyside to chat with the delegates and introduce them to our “Maia” derived Patient Engagement Portal (PEP) “Amity”, which has been custom developed for the region, and is accessible through browsers on a range of devices.
The Amity PEP offers a variety of features that empowers patients by bringing together all of their important health data into one digitised place for ease of access. The platform encourages users to manage their own health and wellbeing with various tools, supported by clinical teams.
Patients and carers can log in securely through NHS login and access their medical records, appointments, digitised letters, questionnaires, health trackers, coping strategies, a health diary and a range of customisable NHS approved resources to monitor and inform their health choices, with guidance from clinicians where appropriate.
Where new services require feature upgrades or new feature scoping, we explained how we align with Government Digital Service (GDS) principles, undertaking a discovery phase to empathise with end users and minimise risk through validation of our riskiest assumptions in alpha, before anything is coded and built. New featured are shared through our networks and the process can be repeated as new service needs arise.
Various trusts throughout Cheshire and Merseyside are now being encouraged to adopt the platform and sign up their patients to enjoy some of the key benefits available. The response at the Silver Birch Maternal Mental Health Launch event, demonstrated the wide ranging potential that the platform offers, in order to extend to a greater breadth of specific health services.
In collaboration with some of the key contacts we met there, it is hoped that we will be able to onboard and centralise the various regional support offerings for the maternity service into Amity PEP, thereby extending the reach of these much needed, local maternity mental health support groups to parents and families in other health services throughout the region.
We are also keen to hear from patients, carers, clinicians or health administrators connected to Cheshire and Merseyside NHS, Maternity, or other specialist services nationwide, to join one of three “research partner groups” that Mindwave have launched. We hope to work with more individuals and partners to influence, inform and test future iterations of both Amity PEP and it’s source platform Maia, with the aim of making access to health and wellbeing support easier for all.
