“It gives people a safety net” – a care coordinator’s experience of rolling out CareLoop

“It gives people a safety net” – one care coordinator’s experience of rolling out CareLoop 

We spoke with Luke Swift, a care coordinator in the Rehab and Recovery team at Leeds and York Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, about what he learned from rolling out CareLoop with his clients, and where he sees the real potential for digital monitoring tools in mental health services. 

What interested you about the potential of CareLoop for staff and clients? 

What interests me about CareLoop is, first of all, it’s a self-monitoring tool for service users, which allows them to have more independence and take a bit more control and insight into their own condition – how are they feeling on a daily basis. For people to engage with that shows really good progress, for people to progress in the community and to rely a little more on their own sense of how they’re feeling. 

What CareLoop can offer is something beyond a health professional coming round and seeing someone on the day. That day, they can be having a really good day or a really bad day, and it doesn’t paint a full picture of how that person might be over a week, two-week or three-week period. I think engaging with something like a questionnaire over time does offer quite a valuable potential insight into someone’s own mental health and struggles. 

Can you share some key learnings from the rollout? 

From the rollout with our team (Rehab and Recovery) we found it works better for people living independently, who maybe weren’t seen so often by the team, or were coming towards the end of their time with our services, or had already been through the inpatient setting and were established in the community. For us it was really about stepping back a little, and for the service user to have some type of monitoring while also being able to work things out a bit more independently. I think CareLoop offered that. 

Can you share an example of where a client has benefited from using CareLoop? 

We had a particular client who used CareLoop for several months. He particularly liked the way that it was constant – every day or every other day he would do a routine of three or four questionnaires, and he felt it provided him with a bit of a safety net. He was someone who was seen by our team roughly twice a month, so it really gave us confidence that we could monitor through the platform as well as trusting him to fill in the questionnaires and feel safe that he had some sort of link with the team even when he hadn’t been seen. 

He really enjoyed monitoring his own mental health. There are graphs on the app and it showed his progress over the months he used it, and when we went through those graphs together during visits, it really gave him confidence that he was able to live independently and didn’t really need to be in services. This was a service user who, when he first came to us, just wanted to be in a care home – he was really relying on services. As he built his confidence up, he was able to live in his own home again. 

Once he was back home, CareLoop offered him that constant contact. Even though it wasn’t physical, there was somebody monitoring his mental health and feeding that back to him throughout the months. He really told me that he benefited from it and was happy to continue. 

How do you think CareLoop could be used to transform care for people living with psychosis, and what are the benefits for service users and staff? 

I think the real benefits come from using it with people living independently – perhaps at the first signs of psychosis or depression, at that first contact with mental health services. It gives a doctor or clinician the ability to monitor how a person might be feeling over a longer period of time, see what real issues are going on, and help the person get the right treatment earlier. People go through so many different treatment paths before they find the right one, whether that’s through a lack of understanding of what psychosis might be, or because it can be very anxiety-provoking to have that first contact with a health professional and try to articulate what you’re going through. CareLoop has the potential to monitor that over a longer period and help the person build a better understanding of what they’re experiencing. 

From a clinical point of view, it really helps to structure visits and make them more purposeful. When we go and see people in the community, maybe every one to two weeks, we can get feedback and structure the visit around how the questionnaires have been answered. It becomes a more meaningful picture of how that person has been feeling over time rather than just how they are on that day, in that moment. 

What I found with my service user was that even when he was having a difficult moment, CareLoop wasn’t just capturing the negative – it was capturing the positive feelings too. It was a reassurance that he was stable, he was doing well, his treatment was working. And when there was a blip, an early warning sign, we could talk about it with real insight into how it felt at that time and what was going on – rather than “two weeks ago I wasn’t feeling too good, but I can’t really remember what happened.” It makes everything that’s happened over the last few weeks feel current, which is important when people are on a lot of medication and may be dealing with tiredness and memory difficulties. 

The main benefit I felt was that service users gain a better understanding of what is actually troubling them and how they’re progressing. And then from a care coordination point of view, the early warning signs piece – we could see when people were struggling and potentially get them seen quicker, rather than just waiting for the next visit. 

Is there anything else you’d like to share about your experience with CareLoop? 

I think it would work really well in community mental health teams with large caseloads – 50 or 60 people. With caseloads like that, a lot of people become more passive cases, probably because they’re doing well and just need very low-level support, but sometimes people do get missed and end up relapsing into hospital. Having CareLoop working within a CMHT, where you can look at a database and see who might be struggling early – I think that can have a real positive effect on health services. 

The most important thing is trying to reduce hospital admissions and getting people treatment quicker when they really need it. But even beyond that, there’s real value in someone simply learning more about themselves.