In today's Fuse blog post, Fiona Duncan, Postdoctoral Research Associate from Durham University, writes about co-locating services to improve mental health and the perils of pulling together an expert panel during a pandemic.
'Cold Calling' by Darren Tennant |
Over the past few months, I have been working on a NIHR School
for Public Health Research (SPHR) project which aims to investigate how “co-located”
services based in the community can be used to promote wellbeing. A co-located service is where two or more
distinct services are in the same physical space and the staff of each service
interact with each other, either formally or informally. Co-located services are often found within
traditional health services like GP practices when welfare, legal and/or mental
health services are delivered in the same building. The project will investigate the benefits and
disadvantages of co-locating in community spaces, rather than within
traditional health services. For
example, a debt service within a faith institution, a welfare service in a
library, a mental health support service in a sports centre, or a money advice
service within a foodbank. We are
interested in finding out exactly how co-location helps to improve mental
health and whether they work for all people in all circumstances, or just some
people in certain circumstances. For instance, does co-location increase access, reduce stigma, or encourage a higher quality of service by
allowing professionals to work together better?
To start this research, I was given the task of setting up
and facilitating an expert panel workshop. The idea being that if we want to
gain a deep understanding of how co-located services may or may not work then
we should ask the people who actually design, fund or deliver these services in
the real world. We hoped that this
workshop would consist of service practitioners, policy-makers, and commissioners at local authorities and people who work for organisations that
provide funding for community projects.
My first challenge in setting up the workshop was getting
people to take part. Where was I going
to find these experts and would they be able to give up two hours of their time
in the middle of a pandemic? I was planning
on the workshop being small (5-8 people) but, in the circumstances, I realised
that I was probably going to have to ask a lot of experts to even hit this target!
I used a variety of approaches to find my experts. I asked members of the wider research team to
email any suitable contacts, we approached the other NIHR Schools and we
advertised the study on twitter. I also
personally contacted some people that had participated in a previous research
project and my colleague, Dr Emily Oliver from Durham University, mentioned the
workshop during a webinar at which she was presenting. Through these methods, three
experts signed up. To get a few more
people, I then started to ‘cold call’ potentially suitable people and
organisations, including almost 40 local authority Directors of Public Health in
England. Despite the pressures that this
group of people are currently under due to COVID, this ‘cold calling’ led to
three more people agreeing to attend.
Having six people confirmed still felt like a very
precarious position to be in, and it turned out that I was right to be nervous, as one person unfortunately had to pull out on the morning of the workshop.
However, luck was on my side as at the last minute another expert who had found
out about the workshop from a colleague at one of the organisations I had contacted,
asked if they could come along. Panic
over!
Selfridges |
This almost certainly helped the workshop discussions flow as
our experts provided rich and detailed information about co-located
services. However, in some ways the
workshop did not go as I had expected. I
thought the experts would talk about the benefits of their co-located services
and the mechanisms involved in how these services work. I had prepared a long
list of questions to prompt such a conversation, but it soon became clear that
the panel had a lot to say about how co-located services quite often don’t
work. They were all clearly very
passionate about what they do but expressed frustrations surrounding service
delivery. One theme to emerge was that
co-located services are dependent on different types of professional working
together, but the reality is that they often don’t communicate well with each
other at all.
Although I wasn’t expecting the panel to say these things,
I’m glad they did. It helps us to understand
how co-located services are working, or not, and is very important if we want
to improve services and therefore improve mental health and prevent mental
illness in our communities. This information will also be very helpful in the
next part of our study where we will be interviewing people who work at and use
selected co-located services.
Fiona works on the NIHR School for Public Health Research (SPHR) Public mental health programme through Fuse's membership of the School.
Images:
1. 'Cold Calling' by Darren Tennant via Flickr.com, copyright © 2014 (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)): https://www.flickr.com/photos/10678076@N03/16001016758