Service design and development
Find out more about the evidence-based resources we have developed. These include mental health care frameworks and pathways, to support mental health commissioners and service providers to make positive changes to their service design.
At the NCCMH, we’re committed to encouraging positive changes to mental health service design. Reducing mental health inequalities and co-producing services with people who will use them lead to significant positive changes, and are a key part of our approach.
Our resources Advancing Mental Health Equality (linked to the NHS Advancing Mental Health Strategy) and Working Well Together: Evidence and tools to enable co-production in mental health commissioning each describe fundamental principles of person-centred service design, and how to apply them in the design of mental health services.
We developed The Community Mental Health Framework for Adults and Older Adults, which is used and implemented across England, and a range of mental health care pathways for NHS England. The pathways show how to access care and support from the following services:
- dementia
- early intervention in psychosis
- eating disorders
- IAPT programme development
- liaison
- perinatal.
Learn more about our service design and development products below.
Principles of service design
Find out more about our resource, Advancing Mental Health Equality: Steps and Guidance on Commissioning and Delivering Equality in Mental Health Care (2019).
Find out more about our resource, Working Well Together: Evidence and Tools to Enable Co-production in Mental Health Commissioning (2019), commissioned by NHS England.
Frameworks and pathways
Find out more about the products we have developed about NHS Talking Therapies, for anxiety and depression (formerly known as Improving Access to Psychological Therapies, IAPT) services:
- NHS Talking Therapies pathway for people with long-term physical health conditions (LTC) and medically unexplained symptoms (short guide, full implementation guidance and helpful resources documents)
- The NHS Talking Therapies for anxiety and depression Manual (formerly The IAPT Manual): An essential handbook for NHS Talking Therapies services that describes the psychological therapies model and how to deliver it (updated February 2024)
- Review of Wave 1 early implementers of IAPT services for people with long-term conditions and medically unexplained symptoms
- Ethnic Inequalities in the IAPT Programme: A Policy Review
Access the evidence-based implementation guidance we have developed for routine patient reported outcome measures (PROMs) in community mental health services for adults, including older adults, with severe mental illness (SMI).
Access Responding to the Needs of People Affected by Incidents and Emergencies: A framework for planning and delivering psychosocial and mental health care (PDF). This framework and guidance for NHS-funded organisations in England, for the planning, delivery and evaluation of psychosocial care and mental health care for people affected by incidents and emergencies, was developed with NHS England and NHS Improvement.
Find out about our documents and resources about dementia care, including our short implementation guide for dementia care, dementia care pathway full implementation guidance (plus appendices and helpful resources), and a related coding resource (Excel) with SNOMED codes.
Collaborations
Access the Dementia 100 Pathway Assessment Tool and supporting information.
This self-assessment tool offers a set of 100 criteria against which Places can measure their current performance.
Hosted by the NCCMH, the tool was developed by the NHS Midlands and Lancashire Commissioning Support Unit in partnership with the Department of Health and Social Care.
It continues the work of the Dementia Care Pathway, covering all elements of the Well Pathway from Prevention through to Dying Well.
The tool can be downloaded and used locally, and includes supporting information plus links to national policy and guidance.
