New Mental Health Roadmap Resource on Live Well York – A new resource to help navigate mental health support available across York

The Communities and Prevention Team in City of York Council are excited to roll out the launch of the Mental Health Roadmap, an interactive resource to be hosted on the Live Well York website which aims to help people access information and support about how they can find their way to better mental health and a good life.

The LAC Team have led this work and co-produced the development of this Roadmap every step of the way with partners, including people with lived experience, clinicians and managers from the TEWV Mental Health Teams, Social Workers from the Adult Social Care Mental Health Team, as well as representatives from several other providers of mental health support in the city, such as York Mind and Converge. The CVS Co-Production Network have offered invaluable feedback to help us shape and define the final version of the Roadmap in the consultation stage of the project.

The MH Roadmap tool consists of a browsable and searchable visual roadmap which is divided in to four main sections, reflecting Self help/Self care, Primary care health services, Secondary care health services and the VCSE (Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise sector). You may recognise some notable York landmarks and buildings in this map. The Roadmap landing page also links through to service navigation diagrams, before branching off in to four more detailed sections, then clicks through to a third layer of more detailed information about what teams, groups, services and specific roles offer. This Roadmap sits alongside a guided section which explores questions and statements about a person’s mental health and life circumstances to direct them to the right place to look for information and support which might help. The second, more guided part of the resource is designed to help those with a sense of ‘not knowing where to start’.

The Mental Health Roadmap aims to be a visual and interactive tool to explore and explain different options which can be accessed direct through self referral through to options which are reached through a more formal service referral pathway – emphasising choice, control and resilience.

We took a comprehensive and compassionate approach to listening to and responding to feedback and ideas every step of the way, to make this into, what we hope will be, a helpful and informative resource to demystify the service system landscape of mental health support and where it all sits within a whole system approach. The Roadmap also features artwork from a talented local artist, Michael Francis, who has lived experience of navigating these systems and has previously walked alongside one of the LACs to get a place where he is living a good life and using his gifts and skills to create graphic novels.

 The resource has been a long time in the making, as the idea for this was first developed in 2019. At this time, a need for something to better understand this system landscape was recognised through the LAC team. The LAC team is made of practitioners from varied professional backgrounds and experience across health, social care and community sectors. The initial team in York brought background from working in mental health fields, and as new team members joined and walked alongside people in communities, there were often questions arising from other LACs for their mental health experienced colleagues about what different teams did, how referral routes worked and what all the jargon stood for. The Community Health Champions, who sat in a wider Asset Based Team, had similar questions and expressed similar points of confusion and frustration regarding how difficult it was to navigate it all. In order to aid explanations, a working diagram formed which mapped out where the various teams and roles sat – this map soon resembled a London Underground map! It highlighted the need to develop something much easier to understand and navigate to empower people to find their way through independently. The LAC team developed some simple training presentation slides which evolved in to the idea of creating a resource which could be easily accessed by members of the public and practitioners alike. We wanted this to help them find their way to the right support in the right place, with confidence, or just understand where they, or the people they were supporting, were within the support or service being offered. A working group was formed, ideas were brainstormed and we researched what had been developed elsewhere. Principles of having something which was non-linear and you could move backwards and forwards within at different times on a sliding spectrum of being well and not so well, grew in to the idea of the Roadmap. 

Along the way we hit bumps in the road, in the shape of an international pandemic, difficulties to get the funding together we needed and constraints on all of our time, however, the passionate drive to develop something which would make lives better has remained and we are delighted to, finally, reach our destination.

The Roadmap focuses on support for adults, recognising there are other platforms which have developed a lot of information for children and young people – with appropriate links through to these.

Overall, the feedback we have received so far has been really positive and constructive, helping us to build on and improve on the initial version of the tool we built with the expertise of the Information and Social Action Manager and the web developers at PPL. We will look to continue to respond to feedback through a built in system in the site so we can continue to monitor and develop the Roadmap in years to come, through continued contribution from citizens of York. Please take a look for yourself and let us know what you think: Mental Health Roadmap | Live Well York