The Knowledge Exchange
What is the Community Mental Health Knowledge Exchange?
This website is a space to highlight the ways that the delivery of the Community Mental Health Framework (CMHF) is starting to drive innovation for addressing gaps in care and to generate integrated population- and place-based systems of community mental health care. Foremost it aims to be a resource for those supporting sustained transformation in stretched systems. While the CMHF was an English NHS policy we hope the lessons will be useful for those across the UK and beyond.
Set up as a space to share the learning and insights from our own work with a range of systems since 2019, we are keen to invite others to showcase their own learning as well.
We have delivered a series of webinars, which you can watch here.
We are offering local workshops or consultation during 2024 based on funding for the Knowledge Exchange.
If you would like to work with us to deliver any aspects of this transformation or if you have examples of best practice, local reports or evaluations or brief reports / blogs that you would like to share, please do get in contact with us at cmhke@plymouth.ac.uk.
Who is behind the Knowledge Exchange?
The Knowledge Exchange has been set up by the University of Plymouth Community and Primary Care Research Group and The McPin Foundation. Along with Integrated Care System sites and other partners we have been conducting in-depth evaluations of the implementation of the CMHF and other related mental health research (PARTNERS 2 and 3). Additional support comes from University of Plymouth Knowledge Exchange Funds and from the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration for the South West Peninsula.
Our evaluations have been funded by contributions from UoP, local NHS systems and NIHR. We are enormously grateful to the staff and leaders in those systems who engaged embedded researchers-in-residence sharing successes and challenges. PARTNERS 2 and 3 were funded by the NIHR. The NIHR ARC for the South West Peninsula has supported the development of this website and our webinars.
Knowing that others have an interest in evaluating the CMHF, we are actively seeking contributions from transforming systems.
Also, if you want to know more about us, you can meet the core team members and read about our approach.
Why do we need a Knowledge Exchange now?
The CMHF laid out a clear set of ambitions to address gaps in care and create integrated place-based partnerships between voluntary, community and social enterprises (VCSEs) and primary and specialist mental health care providers – but with very little robust evidence and no blueprint to follow. However, bottom-up innovation in response to the CMHF has generated hope, as well as many new models and practices. What we feel is needed now is for everyone to work together to combine learning , so that we can determine which approaches are likely to be most productive - and why or where. This is where the Knowledge Exchange comes in.
Supporting systems with the ambitions of the CMHF
We are committed to the greater involvement of community services in the mental health space and wish to support this involvement, now still only in its early stages. What we have learnt more than anything is that changing the culture of large scale systems is possible, but often slow. Moreover, it requires effective leadership, attention to detail for each new role or team, and a dedication to seeing both the system as a whole and how its different parts interact.
We therefore aim to support systems to make these changes become ‘treatment as usual’ by sharing learning and providing helpful tips and reassurance to people involved in those systems.
Some of the key messages that have become evident are that while the CMHF lays out a coherent vision, the scale of its ambition can feel overwhelming in the ever changing, stretched environment of NHS, social care and community services. Nevertheless, change can happen - and now more than ever the principles of the CMHF may be able to help solve some of the key challenges facing the NHS and social care. We feel that it is important to share these developments and to show how effective they can be. For example:
Moving towards a community-based offer, away from traditional diagnostic/ illness models of care, as this may free up space within systems to try new things and develop innovative ways of responding to local need.