Trust launches Dialog+ pilot across key sites
Southern Health have launched a pilot of the care planning tool Dialog+ across a number of its key sites.
The Trust is looking at how the Dialog+ tool improves care planning in its mental health services to ensure it is simple, co-produced, easy to access, and more meaningful to patients, staff, families and their carers.
Many NHS Trusts around the country have introduced Dialog+ and Southern Health are working closely with our partners at East London Foundation NHS Trust and Solent NHS Trust to ensure Dialog+ is implemented in the best way for our patients and service users.
You can find out more about Dialog+, how we are introducing it and the areas we are currently piloting it in below.
What is Dialog+?
Dialog+ is a different approach to care planning. It is based on a scale of eleven questions. Patients rate their satisfaction with eight life domains and three treatment aspects on a 7-point scale. DIALOG provides a score for subjective quality of life and a score for treatment satisfaction. One major strength is that, in contrast to conventional psychological tests, every single item is meaningful and can form part of the care plan.
Dialog+ is based on the Dialog scale and is a way to approach care planning that focusses on what the patient indicated is most important to them at that time. Dialog+ is designed to measure how a patient rates their quality of life and their experience of the care they receive. The answers a patient gives in response to these questions can help to develop a care plan that it is centred around what matters most to the patient.
Encouraging a patient to fill them in periodically, throughout and towards the end of treatment can be a useful way to record progress and how well treatment is working and what goals to focus on next.
Dialog+ has been shown to:
- Improve the patient’s experience and engagement by having more meaningful collaboration between professionals and those using our services.
- To better enable the voices of informal carers, families and friends to be included.
- To improve the consistency of care planning
- To promote better information sharing between teams and services in a trusted and reliable way.
How are Southern Health implementing this?
We are running a Pilot with seven of our mental health teams between September and December 2023 to ensure that we have got the right processes and systems in place to help. After the pilot, Dialog+ will be rolled out to other teams and services.
Teams involved in the pilot
The following teams are involved in the pilot and, if you are a part of these teams and would like to know more, please speak to your team.
- New Forest West Older Persons Mental Health and Community Mental Health Team, Lymington New Forest Hospital, Lymington
- Berrywood Inpatient Older Persons Mental Health Ward, Western Community Hospital, Southampton
- Fareham Community Mental Health Team, Fareham
- Cherry Ward Inpatient Adult Mental Health Ward, Parklands Hospital, Basingstoke
- South West Reablement Team, Melbury Lodge, Winchester
- Early Intervention in Psychosis, Cannon House, Southampton
- Crisis Team, Havant