Community Engagement
The Centre will be co-created in collaboration between the sites in Latin America and the UK, representing a shared vision across the partner organisations.
An effective communication strategy will ensure that all members are equitably involved in decision-making processes, and that outputs will reflect a fair and appropriate acknowledgement of contributions. The equitable partnerships go beyond the academic institutions and involve different stakeholders including people with long-term NCDs, individuals from rural and indigenous communities, family members, clinicians, managers and policy makers. Stakeholder advisory groups will inform priorities, procedures and public engagement activities.
Throughout, we will engage with community members as active stakeholders. Engagement activities will centre on participatory methods, including establishing advisory boards, hosting interactive workshops and utilising innovative dissemination methods, which include:
LEAP
The Lived Experience Advisory Panel (LEAP) is an expert resource for the research team and support to steer the project. It brings people with lived experience of non-communicable diseases and carers, to help as a critical panel supporting the decisions, adaptations and evaluations made in the whole process of the research.
The LEAP experience has been a common practice in research in the UK for many years, but a new concept in clinical work in Latin America. All countries are setting up local LEAP groups, which are formed of people who have recent and relevant lived experience of mental health challenges, carers of people who have recent and relevant experience of mental health challenges, clinicians/facilities staff who also share these lived experiences.
What does the LEAP do?
The LEAP provides ongoing feedback to improve the relevance, practicality, and influence of the research. This is done by:
Arts Methods for Community Engagement
Our approach seeks to activate community cultural resources as they offer a feasible, acceptable, and sustainable approach to support improved healthcare outcomes. It recognises that healthcare is about more than addressing the treatment needs of patients who have physical or mental health conditions, but it is also about addressing issues of identity, meaning and place through developing community-based cultural initiatives. The aim is to improve the health and wellbeing not only of the individuals who participate in activities but – perhaps indirectly – those who live or work in a community. The proposed arts programmes are valued not only as an ‘intervention’ but as “a phenomenon that communities engage in, at various levels of intensity, as an ordinary part of being or becoming communities” (Hawkins, 2003).
We will work with established arts organisations and artists in each country to build the capacity of community practitioners and local services to integrate mental and physical healthcare through arts-based initiatives that enable individual engagement in issues that affect their health but also in building collective cultural capacity that contributes to positive social change (see Adams and Goldberg, 2001).
The efficacy of arts interventions for mental health and wellbeing in health settings has been substantially researched and documented over the last decade (see Jensen, 2018). Fancourt and Finn (2019) note that studies have found that the positive benefits of the arts for individuals experiencing mental health crises are also experienced when people choose to engage in community arts activities themselves as well as when they are referred to the activities through social prescribing. The interventions we propose on this programme will be an opportunity to test this phenomena outside the paradigms and frameworks in which it has been observed in Europe.
SALT and QI (Quality Improvement)
During the process of engaging different groups of stakeholders in our research, two methodologies will involve communities in general (SALT methodology) and QI - Quality Improvement (Clinicians and Healthcare workers).
The acronym SALT stands for Stimulate, Appreciate, Learn, and Transfer. The method is deeply rooted in propelling change from within, using the resources that communities have and it usually starts with visits by local trained facilitators to groups of areas involved in the research. The goal of the facilitators is to bring the community together to discuss the common values they share. The facilitators then stimulate the discussion with the objective of building a common goal around the community. Once the community embraces the dream, a self-assessment exercise starts, under the guidance of the facilitator, in order to understand where the community stands today with respect to its dream. Then, discussion will revolve around what actions need to be taken in order to fulfil their goals. The community itself comes up with the action plan, based on its strengths and resources.
Quality Improvement
For engaging with clinical staff and health workers, we’ll use the widely used “Quality Improvement Methodology”, implemented across different healthcare sectors in the UK and Europe and a relatively new approach in Latin America.
Quality improvement methodology is the continual actions to improve outcomes for service users and to develop the workforce that supports them using systematic methods. The two key elements are ‘continuous’ and ‘systematic’. Whilst there is no single best approach to quality improvement there are similar attributes that are common to all:
During the implementation of our interventions, our Centre Research team will be trained to engage with healthcare stakeholders to deliver a QI framework, and bring together actions that not only Improve the quality of care and support the service users experience in local facilities, but possibly driving the transformation of existing services, the development of new services and the collaborative working of partnerships.
Small Scale Research Grant
Linked to our Capacity Strengthening pathway, small scale funds will be available to Early Career Researchers who have proposed research they would like to conduct in topics linked to the Centre. This will enable young academics to develop further leadership and ownership of research projects and forge a string of new research linked to the Centre’s outcomes.
