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The Advancing Mental Health Equality Collaborative: Using Quality Improvement to Advance Equality in Mental Health Care

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2023

Adele de Bono ,
Matt Milarski ,
Renata Souza ,
Saiqa Akhtar ,
Rosana Bevan ,
Emily Cannon ,
Tom Ayers ,
Viviana Aya ,
Laura-Louise Arundell  and
Mark Farmer
...Show all authors
Adele de Bono*
Affiliation:
Royal College of Psychiatrists, London, United Kingdom
Matt Milarski
Affiliation:
Royal College of Psychiatrists, London, United Kingdom
Renata Souza
Affiliation:
Royal College of Psychiatrists, London, United Kingdom
Saiqa Akhtar
Affiliation:
Royal College of Psychiatrists, London, United Kingdom
Rosana Bevan
Affiliation:
Royal College of Psychiatrists, London, United Kingdom
Emily Cannon
Affiliation:
Royal College of Psychiatrists, London, United Kingdom
Tom Ayers
Affiliation:
Royal College of Psychiatrists, London, United Kingdom
Viviana Aya
Affiliation:
Royal College of Psychiatrists, London, United Kingdom
Laura-Louise Arundell
Affiliation:
Royal College of Psychiatrists, London, United Kingdom
Mark Farmer
Affiliation:
Royal College of Psychiatrists, London, United Kingdom
Meera Burgess
Affiliation:
Royal College of Psychiatrists, London, United Kingdom
Lade Smith
Affiliation:
Royal College of Psychiatrists, London, United Kingdom South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, London, United Kingdom
Rajesh Mohan
Affiliation:
Royal College of Psychiatrists, London, United Kingdom South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, London, United Kingdom
Amar Shah
Affiliation:
Royal College of Psychiatrists, London, United Kingdom
*
*Corresponding author.
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Abstract

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Aims

The Advancing Mental Health Equality Collaborative is an innovative 3-year quality improvement programme led by the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health (NCCMH). The collaborative was launched in July 2021 and involves 18 organisations across the UK who, with quality improvement support from the NCCMH, are working to understand the needs of their population and identify communities at risk of experiencing inequality to improve access, experience and outcomes of mental health care, support, and treatment for those populations.

Methods

An overarching driver diagram for the Collaborative was developed in collaboration with a wide range of stakeholders through steering group meetings, design workshops and remote consultation. This overarching driver diagram informs the development of population-specific driver diagrams, based on the population segments organisations selected to focus on. Each organisation was allocated an experienced quality improvement coach who supports them to apply a quality improvement approach to plan and deliver their projects, including support to generate insights based on data, staff and community engagement, carry out assets mapping, develop the project's aim and key drivers organisations need to work towards, identify measures, generate change ideas to be tested, and sustain successful changes.

Members of organisations taking part also attend quarterly learning sets where they come together to network, share challenges and ideas, and learn from each other.

Results

Populations identified by organisations include children and young people; Black, Asian and Ethnic minority men aged 18+ years; carer population; neurodivergent individuals with comorbid mental health diagnoses; Muslim women/Black women; refugees and forced migrants; women military veterans in Greater Manchester and Lancashire; Bangladeshi and Pakistani men and women in Oldham; Traveller community in Somerset. A number of initiatives are being tested by teams to improve access, experience and outcomes of mental health care, support, and treatment for these populations, such as offering mental health awareness sessions for refugees in a range of languages.

Conclusion

Addressing inequality in mental health care is a long and complex process. The AMHE collaborative is supporting teams to take an innovative approach to tackle this issue, by ensuring their projects are fully co-produced with those affected by inequality. This includes engaging representatives from the communities they are trying to improve access, experience and outcomes for in all aspects of their quality improvement projects; from design to generating ideas to test, and ensuring they measure what is important to these communities to determine whether improvements have been made.

Type
Quality Improvement
Information
BJPsych Open , Volume 9 , Supplement S1: Abstracts from the RCPsych International Congress 2023, 10–13 July , July 2023 , pp. S85 - S86
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NC
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This does not need to be placed under each abstract, just each page is fine.
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Royal College of Psychiatrists

Footnotes

Abstracts were reviewed by the RCPsych Academic Faculty rather than by the standard BJPsych Open peer review process and should not be quoted as peer-reviewed by BJPsych Open in any subsequent publication.

‡

This article was originally published with an author's name spelled incorrectly. The error has been corrected and a correction notice published. The PDF and HTML versions have been updated.

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