Business recovery from COVID-19; Smart Messaging to protect workforce health and productivity.

Founded upon business psychology, "Florence" is a digital platform used by NHS Hospitals, General Practice, Mental Health and Community teams Florence harnesses targeted behavioural psychology-based Smart Messaging to engage patients, change their behaviour and help them to attain better and faster clinical outcomes than are possible otherwise. The system design allows teams to innovate incrementally and in novel areas with uses formally evaluated across hundreds of clinical conditions whilst building a wealth of knowledge around use for mental health and wellbeing.

Innovation with Florence has stretched the abilities of the system to its limits, gaining international recognition, and enabling significant changes in healthcare.

The impact of the system is well documented; (2020) Patients are 87% more likely to complete CBT therapy; (2019) Are 30% less likely to have a mental health relapse.

Building on the capabilities of Florence, an international collaboration inspired the development of our Next-Generation smart messaging system "Clara"(UK/USA) / "Nellie"(Australia). The technologies are massively scalable and flexible, removing limitations and incorporate both workflow and messaging improvements learned from 10 years with Florence.

Uniquely underpinned by broad, independent evidence regarding the behavioural and economic impact of the innovation within healthcare, we intend to leverage this considerable knowledge and knowhow to assist businesses to cost-effectively manage and mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on staff, get staff back to work sooner, keep staff at work for longer and reduce the associated economic costs of lost productivity for years to come.

This project aims to re-purpose Clara for use by businesses assisting them to effectively manage the many staff wellbeing, mental health, self-isolation and sickness/absence challenges generated by the first and subsequent waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. This will be achieved through evidence based smart interactive messaging to;

* motivate staff,
* reduce anxiety,
* reduce the impact of home-working,
* change thinking and associated behaviour toward forming confident healthy and productive personal and workplace habits,
* reduce the feelings of loneliness and isolation,
* improve the feelings of belonging to the company and being valued,
* create a sense of participation,
* improve mental health and wellbeing, whilst reducing the workload of HR staff.

--EXTENSION FOR IMPACT --
During the execution of the project we have had considerably more significant engagement with large businesses than anticipated at this stage of the project. We have so far established an area of mental health support for staff where there is a considerable recognised issue and an appetite for our solution. We aim to show that we are able to address the issue; that less than 1% of staff that need early mental health support actually access mental health support services before going on to develop a crisis situation, and that their colleagues are unlikely to assist them until a crisis develops even though there are clear signs that someone may be suffering with a mental health issue.

We have a route open with several leading household name employers to firmly establish the efficacy of this project with many thousands of their staff across diverse settings ranging from head office through to isolated workers in rural settings. An independent evaluation will demonstrate; a) the activation of employees to assist others in a timely manner and; b) that provision of the project's direct smart messaging support can be used as a direct intervention at the early stages of deteriorating mental health and; c) more employees go on to use already commissioned mental health support resources than they do today, thereby providing earlier interventions than would otherwise be the case.

This funding will enable University standard, independent evaluation of the impact of the project on the mental health of thousands of employees and its cost effectiveness across the scope of uses. The results of the evaluation will provide evidence of the project's cost effectiveness for staff, businesses and society, which will greatly increase the number of businesses to commission the service and decrease the time taken to engage business, and decrease the length of time of procurement cycles.