2024 Mental Health
Equity in Access to Support
Challenge Overview
This challenge is now complete. Challenges for June 2025 will be announced in January 2025.
Mental Health: Equity in Access to Support - Streatham Campus
Despite significant expansion in the provision of evidence-based psychological therapies across England through NHS Talking Therapies for anxiety and depression, services are still only accessed by around a quarter of people in the community that need them (Nuffield Trust, 2020). This ‘treatment gap’ reflects the impact of barriers that get in the way of people seeking and accessing treatment. People from specific backgrounds such as ethnic minorities, disability, neurodiversity, gender nonconforming communities, or different age groups are particularly over-represented within the ‘treatment gap’.
This Grand Challenge offers you the opportunity to use your lived-experience, knowledge, interest or simply passion to help identify ways to overcome mental health access barriers for groups with one or more characteristics. Flexibility in this challenge will enable you to identify a specific group to focus on and try to identify and generate solutions to address relevant barriers. With several members of the challenge and external speakers holding national advisor positions, outputs have promise to inform University, local, regional and national initiatives. If you have an interest in improving access and mental health service delivery for groups from specific backgrounds, or simply an ability to think ‘outside the box’, this Challenge is for you.
This Challenge will run on Streatham Campus.
Speakers and Enquiry Groups tbc
The following enquiry groups are available to enable you to focus on a specific group with diversity. It should however be noted that often forms of diversity are inter-sectional. Therefore, you should not be restricted by any of the specific enquiry group areas highlighted. Indeed as long as you can establish an enquiry group with similar interests there is the option to focus on barriers affecting people with diversity of your choosing. Furthermore, when thinking of an output for any group, we encourage you to think innovatively. Up to now we have continued to struggle to improve equity in mental health, and maybe you can consider innovative outputs. For example, could the promise offered by Artificial Intelligence potentially provide solutions, do we need to consider issues more broadly than just focussing on mental health ‘diagnoses’ and consider ways issues such as the climate emergency may be particularly impacting specific groups etc. Sometimes we need to step beyond our traditional disciplines to begin to address the grand challenges we are facing.
Access rates for members of the gender non-conforming community into statutory mental health services across England are lower than anticipated. This can cause prolonged and increased levels of distress, or where individuals do attend, higher levels of dissatisfaction with the service received. This experience is repeated with respect to University Wellbeing Services, where despite recognition and a desire to engage members of the community to address barriers and inform service delivery, efforts have been difficult. This enquiry group offers the opportunity to develop outputs to address areas such as improving understanding regarding barriers faced or make suggestions for service improvements that can be used to inform services generally. Or potentially you may want to help the Wellbeing service specifically, to consider or develop an acceptable approach to inform and engage community members to establish a student involvement group to improve access and/or enhance engagement.
Whilst University wellbeing services and statutory mental health services are available, evidence highlights barriers exist for many students. The University Wellbeing Service has implemented many initiatives, such as timely access to a part of the service where students can receive a general overview of what the service offers, and if wanted in consultation, be directed to the appropriate part of the service. Or help improve awareness of what the wider University community already offers in terms of academic support, groups within the Guild or wider initiatives that may help prevent difficulties being experienced becoming worse. Such initiatives may also extend into the wider community or be based around novel and acceptable approaches. For example, several years ago the Reading Agency highlighted ‘Fresh Reads’, a successful initiative whereby people experiencing different ‘everyday challenges’ are made aware of fiction that addresses similar challenges. The person then reads the book in their own time and in groups, discusses how it relates to some of the difficulties they face. Within the group this provides the opportunity to discuss solutions or even normalise their experience, so they recognise they are not alone. Their work in this area generated an enquiry group output that informed the ‘Fresh List’ (https://reading-well.org.uk/news/fresh-list), a recommended reading list of novels addressing difficulties faced by students coming to university for the first time. The Reading Agency are back this year to discuss ideas for other developments in this area which may overlap with interests identified by some enquiry groups.
Across NHS England, it is recognised that access to psychological therapies and recovery is far worse for people from all different ethnicities than for ‘White British.’ Continued efforts are made to address this inequity, however the majority of these are based simply on translating written resources or interventions. This itself raises challenges regarding accounting for cultural nuances, figures of speech associated with idioms or metaphors, matching the correct tone or simply with some words be untranslatable. Fewer efforts are made to address the much wider range of barriers that may exist at the individual or cultural level. Consequently, the challenge faced is monumental, not least given people from different ethnicities can vary in many ways, and unless addressed this can present barriers within communities. Factors associated with barriers to accessing mental health services are further amplified as they may not be simply related to ethnicity. For example, individuals within different ethnic groups may vary by the extent to which acculturation has occurred within ethnicities, different generations, within different families or simply by age. This enquiry group offers the opportunity to consider the many barriers associated with people having different ethnicities and if wanted to try to address the real intersectional complexities that can exist.
Forms of diversity are often inter-sectional. Therefore, you should not be restricted by any of the specific enquiry group areas highlighted above. Indeed as long as you can establish an enquiry group with similar interests there is the option to focus on barriers affecting people with diversity of your choosing. Furthermore, when thinking of an output for any group, we encourage you to think innovatively.
.jpg.jpg)
