Chasing the Stigma & Hub of Hope: Usage data from the UK’s largest mental health support directory
Chasing the Stigma (CTS) is a national mental health charity that endeavours to normalise and humanise conversations about mental health, whilst ensuring that everyone in the UK can access clear pathways to support, whenever and wherever they need it.
With lived experience at their core, they are driven to create a society where there is no longer a stigma associated with mental health, where people are as comfortable talking about their mental health as their physical health, and where everyone is able to find appropriate support before they reach a point of crisis, leading to a significant long-term reduction in self-harm and suicide.
They strive to achieve this through the provision of pioneering training services, awareness-raising campaigns and lobbying activities whilst also operating the UK’s largest and most comprehensive directory of community mental health services, the Hub of Hope.
Request
Chasing the Stigma operates a web and mobile application which enables more than 25,000 individual users per month to seek help from 14,500+ listed mental health services across the UK. Since the free-to-use Hub of Hope was established in 2017, more than 800,000 people have used the service.
Chasing the Stigma work in partnership with various organisations in the public, private and charity sector collating and analysing the app’s anonymised data and sharing vital insight into gaps in service provision and mental health challenges facing different groups and communities. There were three key factors that led the charity to request assistance from Statisticians 4 Society (S4S):
- To keep pace with growing user demand, the entire application and data model were to be redeveloped.
- Google’s “Universal Analytics” that the charity relied on for data collection and analysis was being discontinued and replaced with “Google Analytics 4”.
- Anticipating the migration to the new system and its associated challenges, there was limited internal capacity for the charity to compile, summarise and analyse the legacy data.
The scope for the project centred on collecting, summarising and analysing the legacy data with specific emphasis to augment the geo-spatial variables (latitude/longitude) with more detailed location descriptors. This would then enable the charity to streamline highly time and resource-consuming production of representative reports and insights to highlight user statistics such as demand for specific support services in different locations and among various user communities.
Approach
Two approaches were developed to parse the data so that the geo-spatial data could then be augmented with enriched descriptors. Excel’s Power Query and the programming language R were the platforms used to parse the data. The latitude and longitude were mapped using an open-source R library. Discussions were then initiated to develop the processes that would generate reports. These reports were developed using R Shiny but similar reports would be possible within Excel using the extract from this mapping. Since the website would be upgraded to a new data model and analytics platform, only prototypes were developed with the intent that once CTS’ new digital and data infrastructure goes live, then these prototypes would serve as a template for future development and innovation around data visualisation and dashboarding building on the existing skills and tools of the charity’s internal data team.
Result
An interim and final report highlighted these approaches and documented the steps. Throughout the project and at its completion, the R scripts and Excel prototypes were provided to CTS. In addition, a YouTube video that focused on the use of Excel’s Power Query function, using CTS specific data, was provided so that internal personnel could visualize the navigation steps in the processes developed as well as have a future reference.
The reports streamlined the analysis of demand for the types of services searched as well as the locations where the services were searched for. This in turn helped to quantify the size of the catchment areas for the services.
Impact and Benefits
Through this collaboration, CTS was able to unleash the intelligence and insights within the Google Analytics data that was previously challenging and time-consuming. The results and processes that Dennis helped us develop during the project strengthened our position to leverage data insights from the platform to aid those in need of mental health support. In turn, CTS is now better-placed to migrate these same solutions to the new analytics platform. More importantly, these results could help highlight the demand and need for more diverse mental health services in the communities served.
And with this knowledge, it is hoped that decision makers and stakeholders will be better informed to address the mental health crisis and frame effective solutions to tackle the problem.
Quote from the project team:
Dennis generously dedicated his time to strengthen our internal data skills using Power Query and R Shiny. The provision of a tutorial video proved to be a surprisingly valuable asset. We’re excited about newly discovered capacity to support real-time interactive data manipulation, such as filtering and cleaning based on user input, and foresee applying it across different projects.
Your guidance has truly opened up new possibilities. We really appreciate the way you made complex topics more approachable