NHS Live Award - Winner

Oxford Clinical Trial Units for Mental Illness

In collaboration with Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust, Oxford University's Department of Psychiatry has developed a simple, reliable method of obtaining patient reported outcome measures from people with bipolar disorder.

Self-monitoring of mood is a key component of care for bipolar disorder. Paper systems have been used in the past, but cannot be used for remote monitoring or for identifying long-term patterns. Previous electronic solutions have proved expensive or difficult to use.

To keep constantly up to date with how their patients are feeling, the team automatically sends them weekly text messages or emails. Patients respond with their own rating of where they are on a validated scale for both depression and manic symptoms. A bespoke system captures data for each patient and emails it each week to their psychiatrist in numerical and graphical form, including a visual rating of the severity of individual symptoms. This is copied to the GP and the patient.

The project grew from hearing patient stories over many years of clinical practice and has fully involved patients in its development. The text message system has been so successful that clinicians in other cities have asked to use it too. Around 150 patients with bipolar disorder now self-monitor their mood in this way.

Benefits for patients include feeling in more control of their disorder and increased confidence in a response if their condition deteriorates. For staff, this simple and inexpensive system replaces many routine appointments, releasing savings and freeing up clinical time to be targeted when most needed.