Mind & Body Quality Improvement Network

Colleagues at King’s College Hospital (KCH), South London and Maudsley (SLaM) and Guy’s and St Thomas NHS Foundation Trusts (GSTT) have successfully become members of a world-first project delivered by King’s Health Partners (KHP) that will define what ‘best practice’ mind and body care looks like.

We know that integrating mental and physical healthcare services has the potential to vastly improve the care that patients receive. Evidence shows that joined up physical and mental healthcare can help people to better manage their different conditions and improve their health outcomes. Sadly, however, there remains significant unmet need.

Many people with coexisting mental and physical conditions do not receive the joined up care they need and deserve. We recognise there is a substantial amount of research, clinical progress, and a growing social movement that signals the importance of integrated care. However, there is no consistent framework that explains how it should be delivered and what good practice looks like.

What does good look like for integrating mental and physical healthcare?

Our renowned Mind & Body Programme has worked with experts from across the system in recent months to try to determine what ‘good’ looks like, and how to helpfully set the bar for integrating mind and body care in a way that supports services and organisations to improve.

They have developed the "Mind & Body Quality Improvement Network" with the aim that it will:

• Set out what good practice mind and body care is, including in areas such as direct patient care, patient and community involvement, and staff health and wellbeing;
• Enable services and organisations to identify areas of good practice and reflect on areas for improvement;
• Enable learning to be shared with others and demonstrate a commitment to delivering integrated mind and body care.

The project has been co-designed with clinical colleagues across KHP along with more than 100 local and national stakeholders, and patient and carer representatives. The project was piloted over the last few months and involved significant work developing documentation and pilot templates, identifying organisational and service leads, recruiting peer review teams, and developing an approach to evaluation and impact measurement. 

The first Mind & Body Quality Improvement Network pioneers

Following the pilot period, we are delighted to announce KCH and GSTT have successfully become the first members of the Mind & Body Quality Improvement Network. In addition, the KCH Renal service and the SLaM Early Intervention (COAST) service joined the Network and went through the improvement process to identify areas of good practice and areas for development. All participants were commended for providing exemplar mind and body care and their passion to continually improve services for both patients and staff. We will be developing case studies and blogs over the coming weeks as part of our commitment to showcase their efforts and share their learnings.

Sean Cross, Clinical Director of the Mind & Body Programme, said:

We are delighted colleagues at our partner trusts have joined the Mind & Body Quality Improvement Network. I would just like extend my gratitude for their involvement in the project pilot over the last few months. They have contributed a huge amount to the development and improvement of the project and in turn have shone a light on all the fantastic work taking place within their organisations. We look forward to continuing work with them in delivering high-quality, sustainable mind and body care, and rolling out the project beyond our partnership to benefit patients and staff more widely.

Launching the new Quality Improvement Network – join our event

Want to get involved? Sign up to attend an upcoming event where we will be officially launching the Quality Improvement Network – more details here. You can read more about the project on our website.