Health Champions
Research type
Research Study
Full title
A pilot hybrid effectiveness-implementation Randomised Controlled Trial of a volunteer Health Champion intervention to support people with severe mental illness to improve their physical health
IRAS ID
270290
Contact name
Julie Williams
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
King's College London
Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier
Duration of Study in the UK
2 years, 0 months, 30 days
Research summary
Research has shown that people with serious mental illness such as schizophrenia often also have physical health problems and this can lead to a worse quality of life and to dying younger than the general population. Reasons for this are complex but one is that it can be difficult to navigate physical health services in the community and difficult to start new physical activities alone. In this study we want to investigate if offering a volunteer Health Champion to service users to help them to set physical health goals and meet with them weekly for up to nine months will help service users improve and manage their physical health. We will recruit 100 service users via Community Mental Health Teams and a Research Register. This will be a randomised trial so half of the participants will be matched with a Health Champion (the ‘intervention group’) and half will receive information on improving their physical health (the ‘control group’). All participants will complete outcome measures on quality of life, physical and mental health on three occasions: before starting the intervention, after finishing the intervention (or at nine months if they are in the ‘control group’) and 6 months from when they finish the intervention (or 6 months after if they are in the ‘control group’). We will evaluate the implementation challenges of the intervention using interviews and measures with participants and Health Champions. If the intervention is found to be helpful we hope to undertake a larger trial to see if it is effective in a larger group of people.
REC name
London - Brent Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
20/LO/0214
Date of REC Opinion
17 Apr 2020
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion