Centre for Innovation & Evaluation in Mental Health

The Centre for Innovation and Evaluation in Mental Health focuses on understanding the impacts of mental disorder on individuals and the development and testing of new models of care for people with mental disorders.

It works across all diagnoses and age groups. There is a strong focus on multi-disciplinary working and service user involvement to design and deliver work of direct relevance to those providing and receiving mental health services in the UK and internationally.

Centre staff are skilled in quantitative, qualitative and mixed methodologies. The Centre's work ranges from the development of new evaluative scales and methodologies and the development and testing of new models of service provision, to randomised controlled trials (pilot, exploratory and definitive) of new interventions (nine recent or current randomised controlled trials (RCTs).

The centre consists of these sections: Community Mental Health (Henderson); Estia Centre for Mental Health and Learning Disabilities (Craig); Mental Health and Ageing (Banerjee); Mental Health Nursing (Bowers); Service User Research Enterprise (SURE, Wykes/Rose); Women's Mental Health (Howard); Recovery (Slade). 

SURE is of particular note as it is, to our knowledge, the first service user research team in mental health in the world. Regarding mental capacity, for example, studies funded by the Wellcome Trust have shown that it can be reliably measured; that a high proportion of both medical (40 per cent) and psychiatric (43 per cent) inpatients lack capacity; and that those lacking capacity are often not recognised by clinical teams. In relation to the new Mental Capacity Act (2005), our results show that the gap between psychiatric and medical patients in their ability to make autonomous treatment decisions may be less than is widely believed.