Self Help

Established: 2003; first meeting - stakeholder workshop July 2003; now completed

Convenor (Chair): Professor Dave Richards

Members: tbc

Remit and Aims:
The aims of this research group are to identify appropriate research question into all aspects of self-help and self-management.

Current Status & Future Plans:
The group has met a number of times in order to enable the diverse range of stakeholders interested in improving access to mental health care for people with common and serious mental health problems, to discuss both their shared and different objectives.

The interest group has identified four main areas of research which are to be taken forward and developed into proposals:

1. Research enabling users to participate in research including researching self-help itself
2. Health services research (cost effectiveness of self-help, effectiveness, service design and evaluation)
3. Clinical efficacy trials for self-help
4. Epidemiological issues - how people utilise self-help in their daily lives.

The group has established the importance of having both service user, clinical, operational and academic input into all proposals. It has also stressed that the broad range of self-help options should be kept in mind when choosing which area to focus on. Two options have been actively pursued:

Sub-group 1:
Sub-group 1 chose to focus on topics 1 and 4 (service user and epidemiological issues) and has proposed 3 main research questions:
1. What self-help resources exist? (A mapping exercise of the broad range of self-help resources that people use)
2. What is the extent to which self-help is made available? (Looking at the resources which are actually offered through primary care)
3. What do people find helpful? (A qualitative comparative evaluation of different approaches to self-help and self-management)
This sub-group is meeting separately to develop these ideas and is working with the Mental Health Foundation to develop a collaborative proposal.

Sub-group 2:
This sub-group has concentrated on topic 2 – health services research – and recently secured £300,000 following a successful bid to the DH Service Development and Organisation R&D Programme. The successful project will focus on ‘stepped care’ – a systematic means of organising services to improve access and choice in psychological therapy – with the specific aims to:
• design effective and efficient stepped care systems for psychological therapies in a variety of settings through stakeholder consensus exercises, facilitated by computer modelling to forecast patient throughputs, waiting times and capacity needs;
• investigate the effect of implementing these systems on patient access, throughputs, clinical outcomes and patient choice;
• identify barriers to the implementation of stepped care;
• investigate the generalisability of the reconfiguration process including the utility of an implementation manual and computer modelling tool.

Future Work:
The group will continue to meet as an interest group and develop its proposals and to share the participants’ different perspectives on self-help. With one funding application already successful, the group continues to benefit from the opportunity for diverse stakeholders to contribute to the development of research questions and proposals. The process of topic identification has involved all interested parties including those representing service user views. The next task is to capitalise on the generation of ideas and to support group members as they develop proposals.