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Mental health services need now to be planning their capacity requirements for the coming year – inpatient beds, community teams, referrals and caseloads. All of this has been made both more important, and more difficult, by the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. We know that services are seeing:
Niche can work with you to model all the various potential scenarios – and to plan robustly for what you should do next. We’ll help you to take account of:
Niche have worked on many mental health modelling projects across the country. We can therefore bring both technical expertise (using discrete event simulation) and a wealth of informal knowledge of how other services have been addressing these questions.
Our simulation modelling will ensure that the full range of variation in your real patient flows is captured, and that options for the future service model allow you to understand the risks and benefits of each approach.
Our work would begin with a series of analyses of historical caseloads and occupied bed numbers. To test for the effect of Covid-19, we will set control limits based on activity to the end of February 2020. If any cohort (by age, diagnosis etc) persistently breaches the control limits after February 2020, we can estimate the likely “Covid effect” and project forward its implications.
In looking to the future, and planning for service changes, we will work with you, and with nationally available evidence both to identify a full list of effects, and to estimate:
We will develop the models in such a way as to permit rapid re-estimation of their effects as new data emerges, as it undoubtedly will over coming months.
Given rapid access to pseudonymised service data, we can turn round historic analyses very quickly: a “first cut” within two weeks of data reaching us, and a full understanding within 4-6 weeks. Planning future scenarios and then be completed in another four weeks.
We offer very competitive rates for our work. Depending on the detail of your project, full historic analysis can be undertaken for as little as £10,000; and a full modelling project seldom costs more than £30,000.