Mental Health & Wellbeing

UCL has over 300 principal investigators, across 40 departments and research units, directly involved in mental health research. Before the creation of UCL Partners, however, the university had no coordinated programme of mental health research or education. Now, in partnership with five Trusts (which serve 2.5 million Londoners), UCLPartners aims to become the foremost innovator of mental health research, service development and training in the UK. Our vision is to improve population and patient wellbeing by deepening the collaboration between UCL, UCLPartners’ core team, the Mental Health & Wellbeing (MHWB) programme and the partner Trusts. Together, we are focussing on three priorities.

Value in mental health care

Across the NHS, substantial variation exists in both inputs to care and useful outputs. As a result, there is widespread misuse of services. In addition, Trusts must meet increasing demands for mental health care with constant or decreasing resources. To assist Trusts in meeting these challenges, we are collaborating with their highest-level managers to develop methods to measure and improve the quality of mental-health outcomes; calculate and reduce their costs; and give clinicians and patients greater ownership over services.

Disease mechanisms

UCLPartners’ MHWB aims to address the greatest challenge of psychosocial treatment research: understanding how effective therapeutic interventions interface with disease mechanisms. By harnessing UCL’s unrivalled strength in neuroscience, and translating new knowledge about brain function into clinical intervention techniques, we aim to turn new discoveries into real benefits for patients. To this end, we have established the Psychological Interventions Research Centre, which is developing interventions based on neuroscience; improving methods for evaluating complex interventions; and understanding and supporting implementation.

Implementation

Throughout the health sector, the implementation of scientific progress and the optimisation of services are serious challenges. Overcoming these challenges requires patients and—even more critically—clinicians, management and support staff, to adapt their behaviours. Psychological science has developed evidence-based techniques that allow us to intervene effectively in people’s behaviour to improve implementation. MHWB’s third aim is to design interventions that link policy initiatives to specific implementations in training, modelling, and environmental restructuring. The MHWB Programme is working with the UCLPartners core team to help all UCLPartners Programmes develop implementations in relevant services.

For more information, please contact Professor Peter Fonagy, Programme Director for Mental Health & Wellbeing at UCLPartners or visit the Mental Health & Wellbeing website.