Identifying Research Priorities for Early Intervention and the First Episode of Psychosis: Views from Service-users, Carers and Healthcare Professionals

Poster A41, Monday, October%208, 11:30%20am%20-%201:00%20pm, Essex%20Ballroom

Laoise Renwick1, Rebecca Louise Morris2, Caitlin McWilliams1, Susan Ramsdale1, Olivia Schaff3; 1Division of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Work, School of Health Sciences, Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health, The University of Manchester, Manchester Academic Health Science Centre, 2NIHR Greater Manchester Patient Safety Translational Research Centre, Centre for Primary Care, School of Health Sciences, University of Manchester, 3Clinical Librarian, Trust Library Services, Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust, Manchester Academic Health Science Centre

Prioritising research in strategic funding decisions is rarely a democratic process and the vast majority of mental health funding provides for basic research as opposed to practice-oriented research. Priorities are generally decided at strategic governmental level, excluding the views of people who use research evidence such as service-users, carers and healthcare professionals. Including these stakeholder views is likely to increase the acceptability of research and substantially reduce waste. Consequently we aimed to develop practice-oriented research priorities for early psychosis decided by service-users, carers and clinicians. We conducted a UK national survey (http://www.vip.bmh.manchester.ac.uk/) in two rounds which was distributed among EIP networks, affiliated professional organisations and user involvement groups and research departments covering 34.6% of England NHS Trusts in major cities and the environs. To date there are 211 responses and we have identified 130 iterative questions for the first survey arising from 81 responses primarily from service-users and carers. Emerging themes include stigma and discrimination, recovery and trauma-focused care, environmental antecedents to psychosis, reducing delay, evidence for phase specific treatments, and evidence for non-EIP non-pharmacological interventions, self-management and iatrogenic effects. To ensure these priorities are currently unanswered by research, searches of four main databases will be conducted by an independent Information Specialist. Unanswered questions will be ranked by steering group members and key service-user, carer and clinicians will further prioritised to a list of 10 using a nominal group technique. The final priorities will inform the research agenda to better support service-users and carers dealing with a first-episode of psychosis.

Topic Area: First Episode Psychosis

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