Lived experience of participants who engaged in the co-creation of initiatives to improve children's health in a rural Australian community.

OBJECTIVE: To describe participants' lived experience of co-creating and implementing initiatives to improve children's health. DESIGN: This manuscript reports an embedded case study design, which aims to describe participants' lived experiences of co-creating community-based initiatives. Information was gathered from an online survey and two focus groups. The two transcribed discussions from the focus groups were analysed using a 6-step phenomenological process. SETTING: Mansfield, Australia, population 4787, is one of ten local government areas (LGA) participating in the Reflexive Evidence and Systems Interventions to Prevent Obesity and Non-communicable Disease (RESPOND) project. PARTICIPANTS: Participants were purposively selected from established community groups previously engaged by RESPOND using a co-creation approach. The recruitment for the focus groups was a convenient sampling from participants that provided their email addresses in the online survey. RESULTS: Eleven participants completed the online survey. A total of ten participants attended the two focus groups of 1-h duration: five participants in each. Participants reported feeling empowered to create unique, locally relevant and readily adaptable community-wide change. They were supported by a strong partnership that mobilised funding for a part-time health promotion employee. Strengthened social connections were an unexpected though highly valued outcome. CONCLUSION: Co-creation processes may assist stakeholders in delivering prevention strategies in ways that are empowering for them, responsive to the changing needs of the community, strengthen organisational partnerships and enhance community participation, social inclusion and engagement.

Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) has potential but is not sufficient: How can it better meet the range of primary care mental health needs?

BACKGROUND: The Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme has been impactful in increasing access to psychological therapies at primary care level. However, it remains unclear whether IAPT's widely disseminated achievements include the reduction in service users' transition to secondary care services and whether IAPT services are providing interventions that match the level of complexity of presenting problems of those who are referred. AIMS: This review sets out to clarify the clinical characteristics of IAPT cohorts, whether the interventions provided target these characteristics, and whether outcomes are related to the use of the stepped-care model advocated in the operationalization of IAPT services. METHOD: A systematic literature search was undertaken on PsycINFO, MEDLINE, and Embase using the terms: IAPT, anxiety, and depression. RESULTS: Of 472 paper identified, 24 articles were deemed pertinent. It appears that IAPT cohorts are complex and current service delivery frameworks may not meet their needs. IAPT developments and research for long-term physical health conditions and serious mental illness have been recently advocated, though whether these are sufficient and viable when set in IAPT's prescriptive backdrop remains unclear. CONCLUSIONS: Improving Access to Psychological Therapies provision and research at present does not adequately consider the complexity of its clientele in the context of treatment outcomes and service delivery. Recommendations are provided for future research and practice to tackle these deficiencies. PRACTITIONER POINTS: Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) has significantly increased access to psychological therapies within primary care over the last decade, though it is unclear whether its interventions are sufficiently tailored to meet the actual levels of complexity of its clientele and prevent them from needing onward referral to secondary care as originally envisaged. Given the ongoing focus on and investment in IAPT informed developments into long-term conditions and serious mental illness, this review considers whether additional elucidation of the model's original objectives is required, as a precursor to its expansion into other clinical areas. The review indicates that there is a stark lack of data pertaining to the generalisable, real-world clinical benefits of the IAPT programme as it currently stands. Recommendations are provided for future areas of research, and practice enhancements to ensure the value of IAPT services to clients in the wider context of NHS mental health services, including the interface with secondary care, are considered.

Experiencing a dilemma--accounts of working with PND.

Various ways of thinking about postnatal depression (PND) are evident from the literature. From the clinical-medical perspective, it is an illness of the individual mother. The social approach locates its cause in the environment Feminists/social constructionists have critiqued such models as problematising women--they see them as pressured by oppressive forces such as society's stereotype of 'the joy of motherhood'. From the psychoanalytic perspective it arises from unrecognised conflict and ambivalence, related to the re-emergence of conflict between the mother and her own parents. Health visitors working with PND--the frontline of health professionals in this aspect of maternal mental health--stand between the professional/academic accounts on the one hand, and the lay accounts of their clients on the other. The aim of this study was to examine how health visitors understand and make sense of PND. We adopted qualitative research methodology to analyse transcripts from interviews with eight health visitors about their work with PND. The findings demonstrate the diverse roles they have to adopt, and the complexity and lack of clarity of the very concept of PND itself. There were clearly ambiguities and dilemmas of thinking involved--not apparent from the literature, tensions with which the participants struggled. A subsequent paper will present training to address these issues.

Broader skills for working with perinatal depression.

Health visitors' involvement in work with maternal depression has developed considerably over the last 10 years, with a focus upon problems in the postnatal period. In a paper last month we reported on research highlighting dilemmas that can arise for health visitors connected with a lack of an agreed conceptual framework. Conflicting roles they find themselves using when working with distressed mothers, and within a pressured organisational work setting, make it hard to give sufficient priority to such work. By focussing too narrowly on postnatal depression, other important perinatal psychological difficulties may be left unattended. We argue the need to create workplace time to address these issues by describing the provision of a training and supervision package to facilitate this. We give some informal indications of its success and some indicators of the broadening development of its membership and its content