New ways to deliver group community mental health interventions
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Evaluating delivery by trained Protocol-Based Intervention Facilitators (P-BIFs) of a third wave group intervention in community mental health services
IRAS ID
270595
Contact name
Suzanne Jolley
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
King's College London
Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier
Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier
None, None
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 7 months, 9 days
Research summary
Severe mental illness (SMI) includes psychotic, bipolar, other severe affective, and personality disorders. Many people present with features of several SMI conditions. Psychological intervention is recommended for everybody with SMI, include Cognitive Behavioural Therapy in individual and group format. Despite this, a recent review has found that barriers to care, such as lack of capacity in services, low confidence in CBT skills and underfunding often prevent delivery so not enough people are accessing adequate psychological support (Switzer & Harper, 2019). One way of increasing capacity is for therapists to train and supervise a more junior workforce in the provision of manualised interventions that, because they are specified in detail, require less experience to deliver competently. Delivering group interventions can further increase access.
We propose to evaluate a new protocol-based intervention to enable trained junior facilitators to deliver a manualized group treatment to those experiencing SMI. The intervention combines three types of CBT; Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) that focuses strategies to address psychological inflexibility, Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT) that supports people to reduce self-criticism and increase understanding towards the self and others, and Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT) that focuses on distress tolerance skills. The intervention being evaluated in this research is already being run routinely in Lambeth Adult Community Mental Health Teams with trained facilitators, which will act as the study site.
This research aims to examine the feasibility of a large scale randomised control evaluation of the delivery of this group intervention by trained facilitators. For the purposes of this study, trained facilitators will be referred to as Protocol-Based Intervention Facilitators (P-BIFs). The research will also evaluate the potential for reliable and clinically significant change on standardised questionnaires to inform possible future randomised controlled evaluation.
REC name
London - South East Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
20/LO/1004
Date of REC Opinion
18 Sep 2020
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion