Month: August 2014

Mental health research priorities for Wales

The National Centre for Mental Health (NCMH), a NISCHR-funded research centre, has opened a consultation on future mental health research priorities for Wales. For more information, and instructions on how to make a contribution, follow this link. I see the NCMH is also planning a live Twitter discussion on Thursday August 21st 2014, between 7pm and 8pm. The hashtag pulling all of this together is #TellNCMH.

Here are my priorities, as submitted this morning:

  • How do we make mental health services more person-centred and collaborative, particularly at a time of financial constraint and cuts to public services?
  • What do service users need to promote recovery, and how can services be organised and provided in ways which reflect this?
  • What is shared decision-making in mental health, what are its effects, and what can be done to improve it?
  • New roles in mental health, including peer support: what is the impact on users, workers and organisations?
  • Understanding and improving the experiences of organising, providing and receiving mental health care across system interfaces (eg, transitions from home to community crisis services, or community crisis services to inpatient care, or from hospital to home, or from community CAMHS to inpatient CAMHS, or from 18-65 to older people’s services, or across interprofessional interfaces, etc).

In my response I made the additional point that parity of esteem means investing in mental health services and also in mental health research (see my recent post here). More generally, I suggested we need research into the causes of mental ill-health and distress and into actions and interventions (physical, psychological, social) which help, and research into the experiences of people receiving and working in services, and research into the organisation and delivery of services.

 

Parity of esteem?

Today’s Guardian interview with Professor Simon Wessely, President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, reveals how large the mental health care and treatment gap has become. Professor Wessely draws comparisons between mental health and cancer services, saying:

“People are still routinely waiting for – well, we don’t really know, but certainly more than 18 weeks, possibly up to two years, for their treatment and that is routine in some parts of the country. Some children aren’t getting any treatment at all – literally none. That’s what’s happening. So although we have the aspiration, the gap is now so big and yet there is no more money,” he said.

Wessely said there would be a public outcry if those who went without treatment were cancer patients rather than people with mental health problems. Imagine, he told the Guardian, the reaction if he gave a talk that began: “‘So, we have a problem in cancer service at the moment. Only 30% of people with cancer are getting treatment, so 70% of them don’t get any treatment for their cancer at all and it’s not even recognised.”

NHS England places considerable emphasis on ‘parity of esteem‘, with the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme intended to be a one, key, part of making this happen. Evidence like Simon Wessely’s, combined with (for example) BBC/Community Care investigatory evidence of cuts in services, points to a chasm between the stated intention and the frontline reality.

This lack of parity extends to research. Within the last week or so the Liberal Democrats made a promise to include in their general election manifesto a commitment to increase mental health research funding by £50m each year. It has often struck me how poorly funded mental health research is. Mental health researchers can apply for support to bodies like the NIHR and NISCHR, and many do with some success (see all my previous posts on this site relating to COCAPP, RiSC and Plan4Recovery, for example). But unlike most other areas of health care the mental health field has no large-scale, dedicated, charitable research funding. Mental Health Research UK was founded in 2008 as (it says on its website) the UK’s first charity devoted specifically to raising funds to support research into the causes and treatments of mental illness. And that’s about it, I think: unless someone is able to tell me differently?

 

Summer research catch-up

Some time away and pressure of work explain the absence of recent posts on this site. So here’s a catch-up. In COCAPP, data generation and analysis are pressing ahead, whilst COCAPP-A (which is asking questions about care planning in acute mental health hospitals) has officially commenced. Plan4Recovery (which is concerned with shared decision-making and social connections for people using mental health services) is generating data. The draft final report from the RiSC study has now been peer reviewed and is back with us, the research team, for revisions. Methods and findings from this project (an evidence synthesis in the area of risk for young people moving into, through and out of inpatient mental health hospital) were also presented last month at the CAMHS conference at the University of Northampton. Many thanks to Steven Pryjmachuk for doing this.

Further conference presentations, from all but COCAPP-A, will also be delivered at this year’s NPNR conference. And, for the first time, I’m off to an event organised by Horatio: European Psychiatric Nurses. Horatio is a member of ESNO: European Specialist Nurses Organisations, and the event I’m speaking at in November is the 3rd European Festival of Psychiatric Nursing. One of the papers I’m delivering is titled, ‘Mental health nursing, complexity and change’. Here’s my abstract:

In this presentation I principally draw on two studies conducted in the UK to share some cumulative insights into the interconnected worlds of mental health policy, services, work (including that of nurses) and the experiences of users. I first set the scene with a brief review of the historic system-wide shift away from hospitals in favour of care being increasingly provided to people in their own homes. I emphasise the importance of this development for the mental health professions, and show how community care opened up new jurisdictional opportunities for nurses, social workers and others. I then draw on data from a project using a comparative case study design and ethnographic methods to show how the everyday work of mental health nurses (and others) is shaped both by larger jurisdictional claims and the contextual peculiarities of the workplace. From this same project I also show how the detailed, prospective, study of unfolding service user trajectories can lay bare true divisions of labour, including the contributions made by people other than mental health professionals (including support staff without professional accreditation, community pharmacists and lay carers) and by users themselves. I then introduce the second study, an investigation into crisis resolution and home treatment (CRHT) services, with an opening account of the unprecedented policymaking interest shown in the mental health system from the end of the 1990s. CRHT services appeared in this context, alongside other new types of community team, and I draw on detailed ethnographic case study data to examine crisis work, the wider system impact of setting up new CRHT services and the experiences of users. I close the presentation overall with some reflections on the cumulative lessons learned from these linked studies, and with some speculative ideas (on which I invite discussion) on the continued reshaping of the mental health system at a time of economic constraint, health policy contestation and political devolution.

I’ve given myself something of a challenge in attempting all this in a single concurrent session, but I’ll do my best and can signpost interested participants to papers I have published in these areas. One of my reasons for heading off to the Horatio event (in Malta, as it happens) is to make connections with international colleagues, with whom I might usefully share my projects, interests and ideas and perhaps find common ground.