Some years ago I was a member of the IProdE. Do you remember The IProdE? Yes Production Engineers. Do they still exist? I'm interested in Service design in the NHS and the nearest engineering equivalent I can think of in Production Engineering. I'd love to hear from any Engineers working on Service Design in the NHS.
You are absolutely right, the on the ground picture is hugely variant, and does not closely correlate to SOPs. But the reason for this, certainly for us in mental health, is down to the fact that the SOPs state, in generalities. i.e. "Patients with conditions/diagnosis A,B,C should receive Treatments/Therapy X,Y,Z for a prescribed number of sessions." Now although there may be some consistency in describing some Acute Physical Conditions in these terms, ie A broken Leg will heal with-in predictable bounds for most patients, mental heath recovery is much more a chaotic system, with recovery considerably more randomly distributed and complete and successful outcomes far less identifiable.
As a result clinical opinion becomes a far greater determiner of pathway that normalised predicted pathways or in defining clear decision points along the patient recovery. Similarly measures of improvement are far less tangible than those in Physical Health. An X-Ray or blood test can give very strong evidence of degree of recovery in ways not yet so objectively available to Mental Health practitioners.
As a response, to this objective test short fall, my wider research project is investigating the use of bio-markers, endocrine products in the main, as a means of charting the psycho-physical changes through a mental health condition progression and the hope is that by better understanding these relationships between Mental and Physical Health, to give feedback of medication efficacy and treatment impact..
I think we could best progress this discussion if we spoke. Please email me at alan.smith1@nhs.net if you would like me to send you my phone number. I hope we can speak soon.
You are absolutely right, the on the ground picture is hugely variant, and does not closely correlate to SOPs. But the reason for this, certainly for us in mental health, is down to the fact that the SOPs state, in generalities. i.e. "Patients with conditions/diagnosis A,B,C should receive Treatments/Therapy X,Y,Z for a prescribed number of sessions." Now although there may be some consistency in describing some Acute Physical Conditions in these terms, ie A broken Leg will heal with-in predictable bounds for most patients, mental heath recovery is much more a chaotic system, with recovery considerably more randomly distributed and complete and successful outcomes far less identifiable.
As a result clinical opinion becomes a far greater determiner of pathway that normalised predicted pathways or in defining clear decision points along the patient recovery. Similarly measures of improvement are far less tangible than those in Physical Health. An X-Ray or blood test can give very strong evidence of degree of recovery in ways not yet so objectively available to Mental Health practitioners.
As a response, to this objective test short fall, my wider research project is investigating the use of bio-markers, endocrine products in the main, as a means of charting the psycho-physical changes through a mental health condition progression and the hope is that by better understanding these relationships between Mental and Physical Health, to give feedback of medication efficacy and treatment impact..
I think we could best progress this discussion if we spoke. Please email me at alan.smith1@nhs.net if you would like me to send you my phone number. I hope we can speak soon.
