Group facilitation for people who present to hospital with self-harm
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Mind the gap: Could group facilitation using a Compassion Focussed Therapy approach be a beneficial intervention for people who repeatedly present to hospital following self-harm but who are not currently open to secondary mental health services?
IRAS ID
132175
Contact name
Susan McGauran
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Derbyshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust
Research summary
Approximately 200,000 episodes of self-harm (SH) present to hospital every year and it is one of the top five reasons for acute medical admission in the UK (Hawton et al., 2007). Repeat presentation to the Emergency Department (ED) owing to self-harm is common (Hawton et al., 2012; Bergen et al., 2010) and is strongly associated with further self-harm and premature death (Bergen et al., 2012, Haw et al., 2007; Kapur, et al., 2006). The relatively high rate of repeat presentation to the ED due to self-harm would suggest that people are currently falling between the gaps of healthcare and other support services.
The proposed study seeks to engage people who have presented to the ED two or more times following an act of self-harm in a group intervention. Group sessions will employ a compassion focused approach and in 20 weekly sessions, work to increase people’s resilience to emotional distress. The group will aim to do this by reducing levels of self-criticism and shame, increasing self-compassion and compassion towards others and by increasing connectedness to others. It is also hoped that this will lead to a reduction in emergency department attendances owing to self-harm.
In order to capture any change in people’s resilience, the present study will employ a mixed methods approach, through self-report questionnaires, pre and post intervention interviews, and the observation of the frequency and pattern of participant’s ED attendances following self-harm.
It is hoped that the present study will increase understanding of how individuals who self-harm and who are not engaged with secondary services are able to utilise compassion focused approaches and what healthcare providers could do to better support them.REC name
East Midlands - Nottingham 2 Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
14/EM/1162
Date of REC Opinion
2 Oct 2014
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion