How one website is helping mental health service users lead active lives Connect and Do, delivered in Lambeth, brings people together through shared interests and a desire to meet new people.
Most health services are sought as short-term interventions with the aim of supporting people until they are well again, or are able to manage their condition alone.
But this process becomes blurred and uncertain when supporting people living with longterm conditions. Long-term health conditions cannot be 'cured' – interventions are themselves long-term – taking place throughout the life of a patient. Here, high level professional support is not a sustainable option. Instead, there needs to be a graduation into independence, with services focused on building this independence.
For that the first step is to connect meaningfully to service users to understand the challenges they are facing, and where professionals can add the most value. Too often professionals design services for patients, not with patients, missing out on vital insights.
Certitude has taken this approach to support patients with mental ill health. A long-term – and sometimes life long condition – mental illness can be debilitating in complex ways. We worked withInnovation Unit to get to know our service users, delivering co-design workshops and conducting close ethnographic research into their lives. We found that people using mental health services didn't need more conversations about their illness; they just needed our help to create the conditions for them to lead active lives. Many of the people we support had few personal relationships, lacked confidence and relied heavily on interaction and support from paid professionals. Peer support groups, and even the most informal of interactions with professionals are still interactions built around illness. They cannot be a replacement for natural friendships and support networks.
When you feed into this rich insight up to date research, a whole picture starts to emerge. Research shows social relationships are important to the health and survival of all of us. Studies show that people with strong relationships have a 50% increased likelihood of survival than those without. And socially isolated people are also more likely to have early admission into residential care.
So our reframed challenge was to find a way to encourage independence and social interactions without creating another high level service intervention. To decrease the need for mental health services, we needed to provide a light touch, but long standing alternative to professional support. We needed to help our service users to build the confidence to find their own support networks: friendships. It is in this context that Connect and Do was born.
Connect and Do is a tool, delivered in Lambeth, that helps users to connect with other people, do something fun, and build relationships with one another.
It has two elements. First there is a website that promotes social activities across Lambeth, such as fitness clubs and spiritual groups, which can bring people together through shared interests and a desire to meet new people. Local organisations can map their services on the website to create opportunities accessible to everyone.
Our volunteer community connecters can then offer low level support for people who need extra help, acting as buddies to accompany users to groups to help them to make that first step.
We wanted the site to be personalised for each user and reactive to their needs, presenting a coherent picture of what they do and who they know. The site allows them to map their connectedness and diagnose how 'healthy' their social network is. With volunteer support, they can plan how they might grow their social networks by setting personal goals, picking out local opportunities and recording their progress. They can share everything they do with the professionals that support them – if they choose.
The last thing we wanted was to exacerbate the stigma around mental illness by segregating people with mental illness into their own 'club'; so the platform is open to anybody in Lambeth.
Nicholas Campbell-Watts is the director of the mental health service for Certitude, a charity which works across London to support people with mental health needs or learning disabilities The Guardian
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