Mind and Body Healthcare

The mind and body are inseparable and it’s often found that mental and physical health conditions are inextricably linked. The average life expectancy for someone with a long-term mental health illness is much shorter than for someone without, often due in part to smoking, obesity, diabetes or alcohol misuse. Likewise, many people with long-term physical health conditions also suffer from depression or other mental health conditions.

Evidence shows us that mental and physical health are best managed by addressing them concurrently and collaboratively. However, it’s true that healthcare services often focus on just one or the other. So, it falls to the individual clinicians to make this important link within patient care.

King’s Health Partners were keen to share this research through a bespoke elearning tool and promote the concept of addressing mental and physical needs together, for a more holistic approach of patient care.

With guidance from the King’s Health Partners Communications Team, we first developed a bespoke branded elearning template for the organisation, meaning that new topics or modules could be added with ease in the future.

From working closely with Chris Attoe (Project Coordinator: Mind and Body Project), we developed a clear understanding of the key messages that needed to be conveyed throughout the course.

Our storyboards aimed to cater for a broad target audience across acute, mental health and community settings. With a simple message to promote, the key was to not complicate the content with heavy copy, but to translate ideas into as many visually engaging graphical representations and user activities as possible.

Our design layered much of the information to encourage learners to delve deeper into content and dictate their own learning journey. Although key messages were kept simple, we introduced regular signposting to other websites, research and downloadable documents, offering further information for those who might crave more.

As multiple services were introduced throughout the content, we developed a bespoke glossary function, highlighting key words with a popup definition for each.

The final course consisted of three bitesize elearning modules:

Module 1 – An Introduction to Mental and Physical Health

Highlighting the research, facts and figures of addressing mental and physical health. In this module, we integrated the use of animated statistics, quick quizzes and interactive people charts, to reinforce the human impact of the findings.

Module 2 – The Patient Journey

A step-by-step guide through the journey of a variety of service users, to see how their mental and physical health needs may interact. Working from a dashboard of patient stories, each stage of the journey asks the user to reflect on the current symptoms and consider involvement of, or signposting to, other services. Their thoughts could then be compared with best practice guidance from King’s Health Partners.

There were not necessarily any right or wrong answers here, this exercise purely intended to get people thinking and into the mindset of interlinking mental and physical health. At the end of each story, the user can download a branded PDF version of the full journey for future reference within the workplace.

Module 3 – Next Steps

An outline of how to implement the concept of mind and body healthcare within the workplace. This module focused on interactions around where to get support, mapping care pathways on discharge, signposting across healthcare settings and best practice case study examples.