Mental Health Trusts
Utilise an intuitive and efficient digital mental health crisis care pathway that realises the goal of parity with physical emergency care.
Targeted support
Thalamos eMHA is an end-to-end crisis care pathway, from admission to discharge, enabling a Mental Health Hospital to manage and fulfil all aspects of its responsibilities within the Mental Health Act (MHA).
A workflow tool that provides clarity and drives collaboration between disparate and geographically spread clinical teams and stakeholders, prevents clerical errors, and ensures patients are admitted to hospital, to receive the care they require, many times quicker than with existing paper-based systems.
Fulfilling all legal and governance requirements, Thalamos eMHA ensures compliance with the MHA whilst preventing unlawful detentions.
An intuitive and efficient digital mental health crisis care pathway that realises the goal of parity with physical emergency care and dramatically reduces the administrative burden placed on clinical teams.
Benefits
- Interoperable readiness
- Administrative and clinical time saving which can be redirected to focus on patient care, staff training and improved services.
- Protection for patients and their data
- Patient outcomes and treatment times
- Clinical safety and compliance
- Simpler information governance
- Richer data accuracy (reporting) to inform strategic decisions to improve patient outcomes and services
- Staff experience
- Improved partnership working with other organisations (such as AMHP teams and A&Es)
Case Study
East London NHS Foundation Trust
In 2021, Thalamos were commissioned to provide a Mental Health Act (MHA) digital platform, across all mental health provider sites at East London Foundation Trust (ELFT) – spanning its MHA and clinical teams, along with local partner AMHP teams and NHS providers in four London boroughs across 12 sites.
What we delivered
Thalamos was selected as the only viable supplier of a suite of Admission, Treatment and Community Treatment MHA Forms against the trust’s strategic objectives accompanying the requirement to comply with the recent MHA legislation change:
- Better support administration staff and enable remote working through COVID-19
- Reduce errors, lost forms and increase on-demand availability of forms
- Manage transition from paper to digital across multiple sites
- Deliver consistent MHA Admission, treatment, and community treatment pathways nationally
- Deliver standardised data capture on the use of the MHA
How we successfully achieved this
Our objective throughout the implementation was to build up use of the platform in the right way, and limit disruption to ongoing care. Consequently, we phased the roll out across lower complexity and lower risk pathways, applying lessons learnt when tackling more complex pathways later on. The pathway approach was:
- Treatment – involving only one doctor and the MHA team
- In-hospital – involving doctors, ward teams and the MHA team
- Community treatment – involving doctors, ward teams, AMHP teams and the MHA team
- Admission – involving doctors, ward teams, AMHP teams, the MHA team and independent doctors
Patient benefit
Thalamos has helped reduce access to treatment times from 7 days to 15 hours by connecting care professionals more effectively.
Clinical benefit
Patients can be discharged 1-3 days sooner by trusts using Thalamos – estimated annual saving costs of between £360,000 and £1.08m.
Compliance Benefit
At one site using paper, there was an estimated 25% error rate, this error rate has been dramatically reduced to 1.6% since using Thalamos.
We believe that there should be no distinction or disparity between emergency physical and mental health care as exists currently.
