One Mental Health Team realist evaluation project

The One Mental Health (OMH) Team based at CoLab are a multidisciplinary team, consisting of Specialist Primary Care Support (Clocktower Surgery), Specialist Mental Health Support (Devon Partnership Trust, Real Life Psychology), and General Community Mental Health Support and Signposting (CoLab). The project is managed and facilitated by CoLab Community Infrastructure. The aim of the team is to provide an aligned, holistic service to people in Exeter who have complex lives with the aim of providing services to help improve health outcomes.

Introduction

People with complex lives are an underserved population in health services provision. Research into how best to support people who may have co-occurring mental health and substance use difficulties is needed: currently the evidence base tends towards excluding participants with complex needs from trials and other research studies. This is an opportunity to learn from practice, and to use that knowledge to support service development.

Aims

There are several strands to the project:

Strand 1: Holistic aligned service evaluation: evaluating the One Mental Health Team way of working.

This strand will explore outcomes; what they are for different people and what this means in terms of service delivery and quality, and also how and why outcomes are generated.

Strand 2: Therapeutic interventions, activities and outcomes evaluations

Strand 2 will consider which activities are being used and why. It will also look at intervention effectiveness.

Activity

Evaluation will be in 3 phases:

Phase 1:

We will work with the Team to develop initial programme theory (or theories) which explain how OMH achieves its outcomes. Included in this will be some in-depth work on understanding what outcomes OMH is intending to achieve and how that is/will be measured.
We will work with the Team to design a research programme that can capture staff and visitors experiences of ‘what works’ in terms of the content of therapeutic encounters with the One Mental Health Team. We intend to co-design this work with staff, and visitors (recognising that this will be an ongoing process).

Phase 2:

Gather data to test and refine the initial programme theory, via workshops, interviews, use of outcomes measurement tools, observation, team meetings and conversations with the researcher in residence.

Phase 3:

Consolidate learning and support action planning for the coming year.

Anticipated impact

This project will have impact the following ways: establishing relationships with organisations who are at the forefront of innovation in this area; establishing knowledge of how aligned teams for people with complex lives work, how and why and in what circumstances.