The South East Mental Health regional team commissioned a piece of work from The PSC to ramp up existing efforts to collect protected characteristics data for individuals with a serious mental illness (SMI), with the primary aim of reducing health inequalities in the South East.
Recognising that systems and providers in the region were already delivering Population Health Management initiatives themselves, we needed to be clear about the additional value to them of this regional work. We therefore sought to answer the following questions:
- Systematically collecting and coding protected characteristics is an administrative burden that takes time away from clinical practice, why should we do this additional work?
- How will this actually help my ICS deliver better savings or outcomes?
- We are targeting health inequalities already. What’s the point in collecting this data too?
- If we agree to provide this data, how would we even collect and report it?
We identified that the output needed to be a compelling clinical case for collecting this data as well as support for implementation planning. This evolved into developing a number of products summarised below. A showcase webinar took place on 22 March 2023 to share the journey, the outcome and provide practical examples of improved clinical care and service user experience. Please see the recording and associated documents below.
You can download some of the associated communications material below:
Patient facing leaflet:
Patient facing easy read leaflet:
Staff facing poster:
Blueprint for improving data quality report:
Clinical case: Evidence of health inequalities across priority characteristics
