HoNOS Family Dashboards Aotearoa: a story of hope
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Publication Date:
20 September 2024
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Author:
Sarah Fitzpatrick
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Area:
Addiction, Mental Health -
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Mark Smith, Programme Lead Outcomes and Information at Te Pou, writes about the launch of the new Health of the Nation Outcome Scales (HoNOS) Family Dashboards Aotearoa and the opportunity they represent for services.
This is a story of hope - hope that outcomes information will be used to inform good decision-making and improve services in the mental health and addiction sectors in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Arguably, the story of the HoNOS family dashboards didn’t start in New Zealand. It started with the Crimean War (1854 to 1856) when Florence Nightingale used graphs and data to show the mortality rates of soldiers in the Crimean campaign.
Her brilliant use of infographic dashboards helped to successfully make the case for more resources and funding for the Scutari Field Hospital in Crimea. Hope triumphed in Scutari and our modern hospitals, medical statistics, and epidemiology owe a debt of gratitude to Nightingale’s efforts.
As a psychiatric nurse and nurse practitioner in mental health, I have a special fondness for Florence Nightingale as I trained at the Nightingale school in St Thomas’s Hospital in London and, later, worked briefly on the Scutari Ward in St Thomas’s.
In New Zealand, our story continues with the establishment of PRIMHD (Programme for the Integration of Mental Health Data - our national database for mental health and addiction information) in 2008. At that time, HoNOS and the associated measures for children and adolescents aged 4 to 17 years (HoNOSCA) and older people aged over 65 (HoNOS 65+) were made part of the national data collection.
For almost 15 years, Te Pou sent static outcome reports to individual district health boards and, more recently, Health NZ Te Whatu Ora District Services. However, we never knew for sure whether people were opening these outcome reports and how, or if, they were using them.
The interactive HoNOS dashboards, launched in June, make outcome information more accessible and usable than the previous static outcome reports. Currently, there are two dashboards available: a combined dashboard for HoNOS and HoNOS 65+ and a second dashboard for HoNOSCA.
These simple dashboards will enable people in Health NZ’s mental health services to see the outcomes for their teams and services in child and adolescent, adult, and older adult services across the country.
As a clinician, I am particularly excited about team-level outcomes information. The team level is the engine room of work in our mental health and addiction services. It is where things get done. An individual clinician can help to improve their team results by delivering excellent care to tāngata whai ora and completing the appropriate outcome collections.
While the team can work with individual outcomes information, that information can be pooled to enable an understanding of the team outcomes. Teams across the country can regularly log into the HoNOS dashboard to show clinicians in the team how they are doing.
You can also use the HoNOS dashboards to see how your team’s outcomes compare with other teams across the country. This was a limitation of the static reports as services only received their district’s report, they had no visibility over other districts. Benchmarking against other services for improved outcome results is a great way to use the dashboards, and it is easy to do so.
For managers and funders, these dashboards provide an easy and accessible way of checking whether teams and services are doing what they are funded to do. For teams, the dashboards can demonstrate the great work are already doing and identify areas for improvement.
In the future, likely next year, Te Pou intends to launch additional dashboards for HoNOS-LD, HoNOS-Secure and ADOM. We also hope to launch a national dashboard with national outcomes information, so we can track system trends and patterns over time.
Scutari was the start of a great story about using health data and information. However, it’s not necessary to know anything about the Crimean War, Florence Nightingale or Scutari to appreciate the value of these new HoNOS dashboards.
The HoNOS family dashboards are available to all clinicians and managers in Health New Zealand working at Health NZ and the Ministry of Health Manatū Hauora. However, access to the dashboards is restricted to maintain data confidentiality. To request access to the dashboards, please email outcomes@tepou.co.nz using your work organisational mail account.
Want to learn more? Te Pou can provide hour-long online sessions to help you get the most from the dashboards. Please email outcomes@tepou.co.nz
to request a session.
Learn more about HoNOS family dashboards Aotearoa.