Modelling & Analytics

How we can support our clients

Niche’s modelling and analytics services can work with you to address all the main national policy areas in mental health:

Improving access to psychological therapies

• How to “reinvigorate” delivery post Covid
• Balancing online, face-to-face and other offers
• Implementing NICE-compliant services
• Developing integrated services for physical and mental health problems
• Planning for a new workforce
• Meeting activity and demand trajectories

Community mental health services

• Reviewing CMHT caseloads – including flow patterns, intensity, professions involved
• Planning new offers for each client group
• Working out the resources needed to increase therapeutic activity and supportive interventions
• Restructuring the workforce
• Assessing the effects of changes in referral numbers, contact patterns, lengths of episode
• Sensitivity testing for changes in demand or relapse rates

Single system wide capacity and demand plan

• Whole pathway planning – across inpatient/community, across different providers
• Full probabilistic model, based on local data, not just national benchmarking
• Testing of scenarios – “what if” changes to any aspect of services or demand
• Combinations of scenarios – producing an optimised plan
• Sensitivity testing for unexpected changes
• Planning to eliminate out-of-area placements
• Risk-based outputs – likelihood of overspill, or waiting lists, based on the pattern of services proposed

Sim:pathy

We use our own bespoke discrete event simulation modelling tool ‘Sim:pathy’, which helps our clients to deliver services which are:

• Safer, ensuring early and local access to services for people needing it – reducing out of area treatments to an absolute minimum – and improving recovery to help people stay well.
• Financially sustainable, making best use of the money and workforce available.
• Effective, more responsive to patients’ preferences, and better able to handle future demand.

Our techniques & approach

Our productivity improvement techniques are used to analyse and evaluate how each element of a delivery system is performing. This can be applied to a single service or across a whole system or pathway. Our approach to such work is based on strong engagement with client organisations and their stakeholders and we help to identify how patients currently move through services. We can generate probabilistic scenarios on referrals, variable frequencies and characteristics to support the development of service models, workforce strategies and new care models. We test ideas many times over to ensure that they are effective and will meet your needs and those of your care delivery partners.

We help clients to optimise the value of what they do to create improved outcomes. Importantly, our work can help organisations to make better strategic decisions and to ensure that staff and services are able to line up coherently towards the delivery of the plan.

Please contact James at info@nicheconsult.co.uk for more information.