Programme Summary
The Digital Mental Health programme intends to address the increased demand for mental health services by maximising the impact of technology, ensuring sustainability and expansion of digital services while creating an environment of collaboration across stakeholders and relevant areas within Scottish Government.
The programme is divided into a number of parallel work streams that cover the development of digital services and the appropriate infrastructure for the continued improvement, innovation, management and governance that will ensure long-term sustainability and impact. To maximise the efficiency of development work and minimise time and resource required during implementation, continuous evaluation of service, clinical engagement through appropriate national leadership and expansion of expertise within the workforce also occurs.
Aims
- Improving the quality of service and levels of accessibility, while expanding capacity of existing service provision
- Harness large scale data to enhance learning, understanding of service demand and service improvement
- Support individuals to find and access appropriate service when and where they need it
- Improve equality of service access and support services to meet increasing demand
- Work to be aligned to strategic and policy priorities
Workstreams and Objectives
Digital Therapy
- Improve equality of service access throughout Scotland
- Increase patient access to evidence based psychological therapies with the use of technology
- Sustain existing service provision
- Expand existing service provision into areas of demand in terms of clinical, geographical needs
- Support services to manage increase in demand through the provision of technological solutions increasing efficiency of current service provision
Online Self-management, Self-help and Remote Monitoring
- Support individuals to self-manage their mental health conditions by provide access to quality assured self-management and psychological self-help information/resources
- Support individual to find and access appropriate services when and where they need them
- Work in collaboration to ensure that a national approach is take to the provision of psychological self-help
- Improve equality of access to clinically assured self-management and psychological self-help resources
Video Enabled Therapy
- Improve equality of access to evidence based psychological therapies
- Improve quality of patient experience and quality of service within territorial and national psychological therapy and mental health services
- Improve service efficiency by enabling services to better use staff resource while increasing service accessibility
Ongoing Evaluation
- Enhance learning, understanding of service demand and service improvement Add value to the larger digital and mental health landscape through evaluation and publication of results
Innovation
- Explore the use of other technologies to further improve equalities of service access, self-management of conditions, patient experience and efficiency of mental health services both nationally and locally
- Identify new technological and service innovations that can improve user journey and support access to appropriate services