From research into practice and back again?

2014 Conference

Abstract: Sussex Foundation Partnership NHS Trust was recently successful in winning an HSJ (health service journal) award for clinical research impact. Involvement and Engagement in the Research Network was one of the innovations that won this. This paper describes how involvement of mental health service users and caregivers from LEAF (Lived Experience Advisory Forum) contributed to the development of the Research Network and specialist research clinics.

The Research Network is an opt-in register of potential research participants willing to give access to medical notes for initial screening. This enables recruitment to research projects. We talk about how the register was piloted and refined to produce an engagement process that LEAF were happy with.

To enable recruitment to research projects and enable better mental health care research clinics providing specialist care for people with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and other mental health conditions have also been developed. The research clinics offer a stepped care process in which clients are referred through their GPs to a specialist treatment centre where they begin by exploring their own coping strategies. If these provide insufficient support, they are then offered evidence based interventions currently recommended by National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidelines. During this process clients are offered the opportunity to join the Research Network and where applicable participate in related research. Clients may then be randomly allocated to a treatment as usual pathway or to a research group. This methodology enables people to receive treatment and be offered an opportunity to take part in research into best and developing forms of psychological care.

The OCD clinics and Research Network are part of an emergent community of practice in which mental health service users are able to hear about research through events and shared communications and are more empowered to ask clinicians about research opportunities. We show a promotional video in which research participants give a range of reasons for taking this approach to their health issues. Taking this kind of initiative to an organisational level requires a formal process of informed consent around disclosure. We have developed protocol for this which we are currently piloting across all engagement work involving our clients.

The development of specialist clinics which deliver services that offer solutions to need and enable further research into people’s health issues has proved a successful way of recruiting to National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) funded research. LEAF members are highly motivated by the translation of research findings into clinical practice but it is impossible to predict whether research will be translated into practice at the beginning of the process. However, it is possible to make good on previous evidence as a platform for further recruitment to research.

Using research to ensure best care for mental health conditions and enable research participation seems like a win-win situation. However, no evidence currently exists for the effectiveness of this strategy or the impact of involvement within delivery and research. We will therefore report on the way involvement has informed the clinics in set up and in ongoing development and evaluation of this initiative.