Myplace Weeknotes Week 1: Helping under served individuals access ecotherapy with Myplace at the Lancashire Wildlife Trust

Furthermore and the Myplace team at the Lancashire Wildlife Trust, have embarked on a new project with support from Catalyst and National Lottery funding.

Myplace is a green prescribing initiative run by the Lancashire Wildlife Trust which aims to increase mental wellbeing through connecting clients to the natural environment in a group setting. It is predicted that due to COVID-19, almost 20% of the population will need either new or additional mental health support making initiatives like Myplace essential in supporting community mental health provision.

The aim of the current project is to increase the number of people who move from initial enquiry or referral to actually joining Myplace and experiencing the benefits of connecting with nature via ecotherapy.

To share our journey with others we’ll be drafting weeknotes describing and reflecting on our work over the past week.

Four things we did this week:

1. We started our discovery phase with a kick off workshop to understand more about the inner workings of the service. Creating an Ecology Map helped us to understand how the challenge at hand fits into the overall Myplace environment and map out any relationships between service users and other actors.

Reflection: There are many different actors involved in the Myplace service in terms of individuals who can refer clients to the service. The team needs to develop an understanding of how individuals are referred and what information the referrer provides the client with.

Our Ecosystem/Ecology map created during the kick off workshop

2. We used existing user research to complete the HEART framework to understand the goals of the Myplace project and what success looks like for the team and for service users.

Reflection: Decreasing the attrition of service users from enquiry to sign up is a key strategic goal of the project. This will have a symbiotic relationship with the ease of access a client has to the service.

The HEART framework can be a useful tool to set goals and success metrics for a project

3. We mapped the referral journey using a Service Blueprint model to get a sense of the backstage and frontstage processes involved in referring a client.

Reflection: Through this exercise we learnt a significant amount about how processes at Myplace have changed due to the challenges of COVID-19. We also learnt that there are several stages where participants could potentially drop off from the service. We would like to understand when the majority of participants drop off.

Our Service Blueprint of the referral process at MyPlace. The yellow post-its signify referrer actions, the orange the participant and the purple represent the Myplace team.

4. Following these workshops we concluded that additional research was needed to help put ourselves into the shoes of a Myplace participant so we drew up a research plan for the following week.

Reflection: We’ll be speaking to prospective participants who dropped off after making an initial enquiry or referral to the service, project officers and referrers as well as gathering information from Myplace marketing materials. We’ll also be conducting secondary research on the wider green prescribing landscape and gaining an understanding of similar onboarding journeys.

NB: This article was modified on 03.02.20 to amend ‘hard to reach’ in the title to ‘under served’ to more accurately reflect the experiences of service users.