Working with Barnardo’s services to develop the ‘mymentalhealth’ platform
In previous research posts we explained the first phase of our work to develop online support for young people. We carried out research with children and young people and decided on a site name.
Next, we wanted to work closely with existing Barnardo’s mental health services to understand how we might develop mymentalhealth.barnardos.org.uk so it could be useful for them as well as young people.
We had already approached our mental health services to ask questions about how they help potential users and the information they currently share. We had also asked services to check the accuracy of their existing content on the main Barnardo’s website.
Phase 2
For this the next phase of work, we were keen to dig a little deeper into how mymentalhealth.barnardos.org.uk could work alongside existing services. The team also wanted to investigate overlap on themes from earlier research.
We wanted to find out more about the types of support services already provide, alongside asking about the resources services share with young people to see if certain topics frequently appear.
The team had a few assumptions to test, for example we suspected that services might be able to direct new/potential users to content on the site, and that this may be especially useful for those young people who were looking for general advice or (for whatever reason) couldn’t access support in person.
We were keen to know if the site could act as a more centralised place to publish and share this important information.
What did we do?
We sent a survey out to 16 services who had expressed an interest in our work. We asked in more detail about the support they give to young people. We used their responses to shortlist 5 services for research calls, each lasting 1 hour. We aimed to talk to a range of Barnardo’s mental health services, including those providing general support and those providing more specific help.
In preparation for calls we built our discussion guides based on things we had already learnt in previous research.
We started by sharing the first iteration of the site with colleagues and explaining why we had launched with each specific feature. We then asked about service user journeys, with a focus on resources or information shared at each stage. Finally, we spent time discussing how current service information pages are used on the main Barnardo’s website and what colleagues might want from these in future — and why.
We are very grateful for colleagues making time to talk to the team to share their experiences and ways of working.
What did we find?
Our calls revealed a number of themes, including:
- the importance of an individual’s needs before, during and after support— some needs can’t be met with ‘general’ content
- mental health support content needs to normalise challenges and support young people to understand what they might be experiencing
- colleagues use a wide variety of resources when supporting young people and families — the majority are external to Barnardo’s, so we can’t publish them online
- referral routes differ widely, even across similar services
- our site could play an important role in both promoting services, and providing online support for young people unable to access services at that time
- the homepage needs to more clearly explain to users how the site can help them
- there is more work to be done to develop useful content for the site
These conversations gave us an opportunity to reflect on the site so far, providing useful ideas and areas to follow up on. We reviewed these alongside findings from our initial work with young people to prioritise next steps.
Working with colleagues from different services has helped us understand more about how the platform could fill current gaps and reduce the burden on colleagues’ already busy schedules. There is still lots of work to do, but phase 2 of research has helped us to move forward.
What’s next?
We’ll post more in the coming weeks, explaining how we co-created our first pieces of ‘support’ content working with our service teams.
Hector is a User Researcher in the Barnardo’s Innovation Lab team.
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