Identifying research priorities for digital technology in mental health care: results of the James Lind Alliance Priority Setting Partnership.

Digital technology, including the internet, smartphones, and wearables, provides the possibility to bridge the mental health treatment gap by offering flexible and tailored approaches to mental health care that are more accessible and potentially less stigmatising than those currently available. However, the evidence base for digital mental health interventions, including demonstration of clinical effectiveness and cost-effectiveness in real-world settings, remains inadequate. The James Lind Alliance Priority Setting Partnership for digital technology in mental health care was established to identify research priorities that reflect the perspectives and unmet needs of people with lived experience of mental health problems and use of mental health services, their carers, and health-care practitioners.

Direct to Public Peer Support and e-Therapy Program Versus Information to Aid Self-Management of Depression and Anxiety: Protocol for a Randomized Controlled Trial.

Background: Regardless of geography or income, effective help for depression and anxiety only reaches a small proportion of those who might benefit from it. The scale of the problem suggests a role for effective, safe, anonymized public health-driven Web-based services such as Big White Wall (BWW), which offer immediate peer support at low cost.

Objective: Using Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation and Maintenance (RE-AIM) methodology, the aim of this study was to determine the population reach, effectiveness, cost-effectiveness, and barriers and drivers to implementation of BWW compared with Web-based information compiled by UK's National Health Service (NHS, NHS Choices Moodzone) in people with probable mild to moderate depression and anxiety disorder.

Proportionate methods for evaluating a simple digital mental health tool.

Background: Traditional evaluation methods are not keeping pace with rapid developments in mobile health. More flexible methodologies are needed to evaluate mHealth technologies, particularly simple, self-help tools. One approach is to combine a variety of methods and data to build a comprehensive picture of how a technology is used and its impact on users.

Developing mHealth Remote Monitoring Technology for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: A Qualitative Study Eliciting User Priorities and Needs.

Background: Guidelines in the United Kingdom recommend that medication titration for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) should be completed within 4-6 weeks and include regular reviews. However, most clinicians think that weekly clinic contact is infeasible, and audits have shown that this timeline is rarely achieved. Thus, a more effective monitoring and review system is needed; remote monitoring technology (RMT) may be one way to improve current practice.

Informing the development of services supporting self-care for severe, long term mental health conditions: a mixed method study of community based mental health initiatives in England.

Background: Supporting self-care is being explored across health care systems internationally as an approach to improving care for long term conditions in the context of ageing populations and economic constraint. UK health policy advocates a range of approaches to supporting self-care, including the application of generic self-management type programmes across conditions. Within mental health, the scope of self-care remains poorly conceptualised and the existing evidence base for supporting self-care is correspondingly disparate.

Patient and public involvement in the coproduction of knowledge: reflection on the analysis of qualitative data in a mental health study.

Patient and public involvement in health research is increasingly well established internationally, but the impacts of involvement on the research process are hard to evaluate. We describe a process of qualitative data analysis in a mental health research project with a high level of mental health service user and carer involvement, and reflect critically on how we produced our findings. Team members not from research backgrounds sometimes challenged academic conventions, leading to complex findings that would otherwise have been missing.

Self-care in mental health services: a narrative review.

Self-care is an important approach to the management of long-term health conditions and in preventing ill-health by living a healthy lifestyle. The concept has been used to a limited extent in relation to mental health, but it overlaps with the related concepts of recovery, self-management and self-help. These related concepts all entail individuals having more choice and control over treatment and a greater role in recovery and maintaining their health and well-being.

Experiences of service user and carer participation in health care education.

The agenda of involving service users and their carers more meaningfully in the development, delivery and evaluation of professional education in health is gaining in importance. The paper reports on a symposium which presented three diverse initiatives, established within a school of nursing and midwifery in the United Kingdom. These represent different approaches and attempts to engage service users and in some instances carers more fully in professional education aimed at developing mental health practitioners.

Shifting the focus: sequential methods of analysis with qualitative data.

The purpose of this article is to illustrate both the processes of data analysis and the methodological development involved in adopting the sequential use of two data analysis methods applied to the same data set. Understanding of the phenomena of interest was sought through examining both the content and the form of nurses' accounts of practice experiences. Initially, a method of thematic content analysis was applied to understand what the nurses said about their experiences.

Does Advanced Access improve access to primary health care? Questionnaire survey of patients.

Background: General practices in England have been encouraged to introduce Advanced Access, but there is no robust evidence that this is associated with improved access in ways that matter to patients.

Aim: To compare priorities and experiences of patients consulting in practices which do or do not operate Advanced Access.

Design Of Study: Patient questionnaire survey.

Impact of Advanced Access on access, workload, and continuity: controlled before-and-after and simulated-patient study.

Background: Case studies from the US suggest that Advanced Access appointment systems lead to shorter delays for appointments, reduced workload, and increased continuity of care.

Aim: To determine whether implementation of Advanced Access in general practice is associated with the above benefits in the UK.

Design Of Study: Controlled before-and-after and simulated-patient study.

A socially inclusive approach to user participation in higher education.

Aim: This paper is a report of a study to evaluate the development of an innovative Service User Academic post in mental health nursing in relation to student learning and good employment practice in terms of social inclusion.

Background: Institutions providing professional mental health education are usually expected to demonstrate user involvement in the design, delivery and evaluation of their educational programmes to ensure that user voices are central to the development of clinical practice. Involvement can take many forms but not everyone values user knowledge as equal to other sources of knowledge.

Experiences of service user and carer participation in health care education.

The agenda of involving service users and their carers more meaningfully in the development, delivery and evaluation of professional education in health is gaining in importance. The paper reports on a symposium which presented three diverse initiatives, established within a school of nursing and midwifery in the United Kingdom. These represent different approaches and attempts to engage service users and in some instances carers more fully in professional education aimed at developing mental health practitioners.