Co-Opts

We’re looking for service users, clinicians and researchers to help co-design our product before we pilot it. Please DM if you would like to help. Co-Opts was formed by a technologist and one of the highest qualified therapist practitioners in the UK to address the world’s largest disease burden, poor mental health. Exploring the mental health space, it became obvious that it is the one area of healthcare where the practitioner and service user seems to have been forgotten. Other Clinicians have many tools at their disposal to improve practice and outcomes for patients from simple checklists for surgeons to multimillion dollar MRI machines to aid imaging. However, in the field of mental health 100 years from it's founding the typical clinician only has the couch and the pen and notebook. Co-Opts is looking to change that by building digital tools explicitly for the therapist and the service user. We believe that building these tools will help therapists to be more productive and to have more positive outcomes. We also believe that giving these tools to service users will improve positive outcomes while empowering them. This is important because too few people with poor mental health get seen by a specialist. A little over 2m of the 15m people who will have a diagnosable mental health condition this year in the UK will get to access professional help. Another obscure fact is that for the worlds largest single disease category, depression and anxiety, clinicians need to treat 7 people to help 1 start to recover so too few are helped to recover. There is good evidence that that number could be improved form 1 in 7 to 1 in 2. This is now critical as COVID-19 has exacerbated an already grave position with significant shortages of qualified clinicians, approx 12.9% Dec 2019. Compounding the achievability of meaningful change is the additional pressure of a government target of doubling the numbers treated to 4m over the next 3-4 years.