Case Study How Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin NHS Talking Therapies is supporting patients at Step 3 with digital mental health tools
Tools for Therapy by SilverCloud® Amwell®, empowers therapists and patients with a suite of digital tools to improve outcomes and engagement during, in between and post therapy session
As a valued partner, the SilverCloud platform invited Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin NHS Talking Therapies to pilot Tools for Therapy with their Step 3, high intensity CBT practitioners. With enhanced functionality and upgraded programmes, SilverCloud Tools for Therapy allows services to open up new treatment options, offering additional choice and extended support for people with more complex conditions.
The Challenge
Having seen the benefits the SilverCloud platform delivered at Step 2 of Talking Therapies, the service was keen to add digital to the tools available to therapists and patients at Step 3.
For many clients, using digital products and apps is second nature and having all their work and resources stored in a tool on their phone is simply more convenient than managing paper handouts or emails.
Using a digital platform as part of therapy has the potential to solve pain points for clinicians too, particularly in relation to remote collaboration. Facilitating a remote therapy session requires clinicians to share documents with the client in advance via email. When clients have completed a pen-and-paper exercise, they have to take a photo of their work and send it back to the therapist. Finally, once the session is complete, the therapist has significant admin work to get all of the notes and documents uploaded to the electronic patient records system.
But deploying the SilverCloud platform at Step 3 requires a different approach to the guided self-help model used at Step 2.
Step 3 therapists need to be able to curate the digital content their patients have access to, and control how and when to introduce a new concept or digital tool, based on their clinical judgement. And while it's useful for patients to work independently on tools between sessions, in high intensity CBT clinicians need to be able to collaborate on tools with their patient.