Maudsley Care Pathways

Mental Health of Older Adults and Dementia CAG at South London and Maudsley NHS Trust tasked Onclick with reviewing and improving their resources for care pathways across the service.

At the time, staff used a mixture of hard copy and digital files to access information about care pathways. These were all presented in different formats and proved difficult to keep up to date or ensure members of staff were always viewing the latest versions available.

It was essential to promote consistency of service throughout the trust and ensure all clinicians were working in line with the latest high quality research and agreed best practice standards at each stage of the patient journey.

SLaM were keen to investigate options for bringing all this information online in an up-to-date and interactive knowledge base for health professionals, service users and carers alike.

Following a number of review meetings and focus group events with department leads, we analysed existing resources and identified key stages, routes and common topics featured within the care pathways.

In response to our results, Onclick embarked upon developing a highly complex and layered website that would filter intervention and outcome measures, dependent on an initial diagnosis selection.

We used WordPress as our basis for the website structure and developed a content within a Tree Page View plugin, allowing us to visually see the filtering system during the build.

All content, supplied from over 60 expert authors, needed to be written within a standard format to retain consistency throughout the site. Templates were therefore provided to multi-disciplinary team of nurses, doctors and consultants who collaborated in specialist groups to complete and submit their material.

As expected, various interventions and outcome measures were repeated across care pathway routes, however each might be slightly different depending on the specific diagnosis. Due to variations of screens and interlinking to alternate interventions within that selected route, numerous versions of similar pages were created. To assist with content management, we implemented a page referencing system, ensuring ease of updating in the future. At present, we have built over 1500 web pages within the site, and this continues to grow as new research is added.

As much of the content was research-led and written primarily for health professional use, SLaM felt it key to integrate an additional glossary tool-tip, explaining key medical terms to others that may visit the site.

To explain and introduce this innovative, online application, Onclick also developed a fun instructional video to sit on the home page. This was built using screen capture software and included a very special recorded voiceover from one of SLaM’s own valuable carers.

SLaM’s online Care Pathways is an easy-to-use tool that describes the journey a person will take once a diagnosis has been made and the anticipated care provided for by the service, within an appropriate time frame.

It has received high acclaim from staff across the Kings Health Partners group and continues to be updated annually by Onclick.

Onclick is the preferred provider by the SLaM Education and Training Department and were recommended to the CAG to develop our online care pathways. Their warm and approachable business acumen made an incredibly complex and intrinsic project seem manageable.

Neil Robertson

Associate Director of Education and Training, SLaM

The launch of this application signals the culmination of the work of around 60 of our leading mental health experts, working together to provide a digital solution to help patients manage their condition. It’s a staggering piece of work that will be of real benefit to our service users and clinicians and help them manage their care in the digital age like never before.

Professor Rob Howard

Professor of Old Age Psychiatry, Kings College London, Consultant Old Age Psychiatrist, SLaM

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