General theme : “Evaluation of mental health services: everyone’s business”
At a time when mental health needs are high but care not always up to the challenge, building on users’ and professionals’ experiences is of utmost importance to improve mental health care.
The role of people with a lived experience of mental ill-health across the lifespan is essential, especially in the context of recovery-oriented interventions, as is the role of their families, carers, and professionals. These experiences, integrated into all processes of care and policy, define and shape the clinical, ethical, epistemological, and political aspects of mental health and together determine the quality of mental health care.
The 15th ENMESH Conference will present innovative and state-of-the-art methods and results of current research, and offer many opportunities to delve into these and other factors that shape mental health services.
Topic 1: Users’ lived experiences
This theme will address the methods developed to gather service users’ experiences in different contexts, such as emergency services, outpatient care, involuntary hospitalisation, continuity of care and follow-up, linkage with primary care, as well as the role of family members and other close persons.
Topic 2: Child and adolescent mental health
This theme will be dedicated to the specific aspects of the evaluation of children and adolescent mental health care, particularly with regard to the multiple stakeholders whose perspectives need to be taken into account: service users, including parents and families, as well as the perspectives of health care workers and other professionals, including primary care practitioners, social workers, child psychiatrists and psychologists, school professionals (teachers and health care workers).
Topic 3: Health system and interdisciplinary approaches to quality
This topic will cover professional actors of services evaluation: medical and non-medical professions, as well as the different scopes of evaluation including health economics and implementation research. A special focus will be on accreditation systems, which have been developed in most European countries, so far with limited knowledge about their contribution to improving services. Further, light will be shed on recent developments of quality of care indicators and practice guidelines in different care settings.
Topic 4: New frontiers in research and policy
This theme will cover cutting-edge innovations in academic disciplines (e.g. Mad Studies and survivor research, citizen science), study design (e.g. realist evaluation, adaptive trials), data sources (e.g. environmental wearables, big data), interventions (e.g. patient-controlled admissions, Recovery Colleges), digital interventions (e.g. recommender systems, natural language processing), data analysis (e.g. network meta-analysis, qualitative meta-synthesis), as well as ethical, epistemological and policy issues related to mental health care, including collective approaches (e.g. community action, social movements).