ChatHealth

5th March 2019

ChatHealth is a safe, secure messaging service that puts young people and parents directly in touch with healthcare professionals. Developed by Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust, it supports greater efficiencies by enabling individual nurses to provide services to many more people.

“It allows us to express ourselves in ways we couldn’t express to our friends – to know it’s confidential makes me open-up.”
Service user

Summary:

ChatHealth helps to safeguard vulnerable teenagers and millennial parents. It uses technology that they are familiar with to enable them to securely contact a healthcare professional, supporting timely, confidential access to help. ChatHealth is co-designed by clinicians and service users. Its messaging helplines make holistic help universally accessible, simply by promoting a single centrally-staffed service throughout an area. Service users do not need to wait for a clinician to visit and the service is completely anonymous, meaning it reaches out to often seldom heard groups.

Challenge/problem identified:

Teenagers are increasingly high risk. When ChatHealth launched in 2013, the number of reported young suicides were the highest they’d been in ten years with depression and self-harming doubling. Meanwhile one in five mothers suffer from perinatal mental health issues*.

Traditional ways of accessing healthcare can be stigmatised and are inconsistently available across areas. 11% of clinical posts in mental healthcare are vacant so there aren’t nearly enough qualified staff to go around.

Evidence shows that young people sometimes feel more comfortable and confident relaying sensitive issues via mobile technology rather than a face-to-face discussion with a healthcare professional whilst busy parents especially value its convenience.

*www.time-to-change.org.uk/category/blog/perinatal-mental-illness

Impact:

Available to nearly two million young people in England
Available to parents of nearly 80,000 newborn babies a year
Increased service reach/access – delivering 100 additional contacts every month
Overcomes the stigma of face-to-face discussion of sensitive issues
Reaches more underserved groups – 1 in 5 male users compared to 1 in 10 in face-to-face clinics

Download a list of supporting evidence here.

ChatHealth Implementation Toolkit 2019

Fellow: Caroline Palmer