Getting to the CORE: testing a co-design technique to optimise psychosocial recovery outcomes for people affected by mental illness in the community mental health setting.

Mental Health Experience Co-design (MH ECO) is a structured process for service users (consumers), carers and mental health staff to come together to identify improvements to service planning and delivery and co-design the solutions to these improvements. The process is facilitated by trained researchers experienced in the use of co-design methods. The intervention will be implemented over nine months from 2014-2017 at up to eleven participating mental health teams (clusters). There are two main stages to MH ECO. Stage one is information gathering through an open ended computer assisted telephone interview (CATI) and focus groups and face to face interviews. Stage two is a facilitated co-design process where collaboration and co-design groups are established and meet over five months.. The telephone interview is undertaken over six weeks with consumers and carers at each mental health team to identify the positive and negative experiences of services. Interviews take up to one hour to complete. Each team will have up to 30 consumers and 30 carers recruited. All 30 consumers and 30 carers who express interest will be invited to complete the CATI. Up to three positive and three negative touch points (experiences) are discussed in consumer, carer and staff focus groups to gain better understanding. Focus groups are held separately, for up to two hours, with 8-10 people participating in these. The second stage involves the co-design process. Consumers, carers and staff who express interest in the co-design process receive two training sessions over two weeks to build skills and confidence for working in group settings. Training sessions are up to two hours each. Following the completion of training sessions, a collaboration group (8-10 people in each cluster) is established comprised of consumers, carers and staff members.. The collaboration group meets first (for up to two hours) to set objectives for achieving some changes around the identified negative touch points. This is followed by the establishment of up to three co-design groups (8-10 people in each cluster - there is one co-design group for each of the negative touch points). Co-design groups meet three times for up to two hours. Session one explores the negative touch point to brainstorm ideas for change, session two focuses in on what will change and session three is the development of an action plan for implementation. The action plan is returned to the second collaboration group meeting for implementation in month six. A month one implementation period is scheduled where there is no contact with any clusters.