Dr Sean Manzi

Service improvement projects often focus on making changes to one service or area of care. When a change is made to one service or area of care there are implications for other services. Making a change to one service can impact positively and negatively on other services. Mental health trusts are not currently able to determine the impact of service improvement projects across the many services that they provide. This programme of proposed research will aim to understand how network-based whole system models can be used to support service improvement projects in mental health services.

The first stage of this project will survey the types of service improvement measures used by NHS mental health trusts in England. The findings from this study will be used to determine the types of information that need to be available to mental health trusts when assessing the wider system impact of service improvement projects. The applicant has piloted a method for representing large mental health systems, understanding the structure of the system and how the different services interact.

In the second stage of the project, this method of whole system modelling will be extended to create generalised approach for assessing the impact of service improvement projects across all of the different services provided by a mental health trust.

The final stage of this project will scope out, make recommendations and exemplify the most appropriate ways to present whole system model outputs to support decision making.

Research articles

Manzi, S. (2023) Understanding health system operation using networks: A literature review