Evidencing the value of Kooth
Aaron Sefi, Kooth's Chief Product and Research Officer discusses why and how Kooth set about developing a groundbreaking measure of single session therapy sessions.
Ever since I joined Kooth over 14 years ago, I've been interested in innovating in order to achieve positive outcomes and, importantly, understanding how you can evidence in different ways the impact of a digital mental health service.
For example, our model is predicated on quick access, and we often talk about single session one at-a-time therapy, but how can we prove that it is effective and valuable?
Kooth was built to provide immediate upstream support, focusing on assets, not deficits. About six years ago now, we started a theory of change project to determine what the actual service is, which was vital as we continued to innovate. This logic model identified single session, one-at-a-time therapy as a key pathway. Today, 83% of our chat users only have single sessions, but does it work for the people who need our service?
First of its kind research
To find out we embarked on some ground-breaking research. Using our findings from the Theory of Change project, we built a Session Wants and Needs Outcome Measure (SWAN-OM). It's about what the user wants and needs from that session. Users will typically come into the chat and work through a series of short filtering questions and statements to set their session goals. There's also a free text box where users can add comments. The practitioner gets that information and is able to see what the user has come for, directing the session accordingly.
As a three-year project we validated the measure with users and practitioners, academics - namely the Anna Freud Centre and community providers. There was simply no point having a measure unless it was usable, engaging and providing the data that we needed.
Far-reaching impact
The impact of work so far has been far reaching. As well as being published in three peer-reviewed journal papers and one international conference paper (with more in the pipeline), we're driving an evidence base that can support the single session model for other NHS and community providers.
We're also driving a new approach to collecting outcomes of what users actually want and need. To date, 4,600 users have completed SWAN-OM and 71% have found their session met their wants and needs.
SWAN-OM is the first ever digital outcome measure for single session therapy, and I firmly believe it is the go-to instrument for mental health service providers aiming to improve outcomes through single-session therapy.
What is SWAN-OM enriching? For me, it's about driving an evidence base that can support a single session model, generally, both for Kooth but also for the NHS as a whole, and community providers. We've known anecdotally for years that there's a real benefit to single sessions. Now we've got a measure that we can make free to use to capture that data as well. It's also about a new approach to collecting measures that focuses on what people actually need and want, and providing services in a way that works best for them. That's hugely valuable for anybody delivering mental health services across the NHS and beyond.
To watch Aaron’s presentation in full, including more information on SWAN-OM and another of Kooth’s measurement tools, click here.
To find out how Kooth’s digital innovations mentioned above can help drive better outcomes for patients and healthcare services, email ask@kooth.com and we’ll be in touch.
