The NHS West Midlands Regional Development centre had the opportunity to work alongside four West Midlands IAPT (Improving Access to Psychological Therapies) early implementor sites to capture success narratives of their journey in implementing local IAPT services and to offer protected development time to them to look at their next stage development needs.

Read the document summarising this narrative process and results from some regional IAPT teams

See an example of this technique used at the regional IAPT Conference

The four areas who agreed to work with us were :Shropshire, Stoke, North Staffordshire and Wolverhampton.

The collated evidence  and narratives from the four sites were presented in a Regional report and through a workshop at the IAPT conference on the 25th March 2009. We hope that this resource material will prove invaluable to emerging services across the West Midlands.

Each area protected 1 full day to work through the process. The day offered part developmental and part narrative collection.

Each team received as part of the process, a confidential report, which gave them the following:

1. A team consensus of the critical components (8 domains identified by them from morning exercise) of delivering successful IAPT from their perspective in their area
2. A rating of individual, and a team rating of where things are now for each of those domains
3. A current reality/desired future narrative from each team member for each domain
4. What is currently helping and what has hindered
5. Key action plan themes to move forward/develop across each domain

This approach gave a great opportunity for the local services to develop an action/ developmental plan that was developed and owned from within the team.

Finally to close the day, we asked each area to prepare in advance 2/3 successful case vignettes and using a narrative gathering technique we captured and produced evidence of the important themes within each story.

The RDC hope that the case vignettes are success stories reflecting the depth of service provision locally. The RDC  wrote these up individually for each area and they will become a useful resource for the service to use at a later date.

From all of the information collected across the 4 early implementor sites, the RDC collated the key themes and messages into a conference report.The report has clustered and themed domains, it identifies and helps people understand the current reality, what helps and what hinders service delivery from the sites perspective, but importantly gives some guidelines/suggestions around action/developmental ideas generated from early Implementer sites.

The clustered and themed domains that are generated using this process can become a template, using which emerging sites can benchmark their progress.

Please contact Mark Rayne for further information.

Read the document summarising this narrative process and results from some regional IAPT team

See an example of this technique used at the regional IAPT Conference