None listed
Conditions
Brief summary
Consumer advocates, growing evidence, national guidelines and practice frameworks all emphasise the need for mental health consumers to participate more and have greater control over their mental health recovery planning. However, research indicates that services struggle to translate these empowerment principles into practice. Goal setting and action planning continue to be staff rather than consumer driven. Our project will support consumers to attain greater control over their recovery assessment, goal setting and action planning. Our project will co-design and test the impact of the DRIVing my own mental health Recovery App (Driv-R). This App will build upon a widely adopted, well-validated, recovery-focused mental health self-assessment (RAS-DS – Recovery Assessment Scale – Domains and Stages). Extensive previous work and the co-design process will ensure consumer- and staff-prioritised features are embedded. In Phase One we will co-develop and co-produce the App. We will use Human Centred Design to deeply engage consumer expertise within and beyond the research team. Iterative cycles will include deep-dive design labs, co-development, user-exploration and feedback processes. In Phase Two (this trial), we will evaluate the App using a multi-methods approach. First, a pragmatic trial will be conducted with consumer-staff dyads implementing Driv-R compared to practice as usual during a “waitlist” period. The primary outcome measured is mental health self-efficacy. Secondary outcomes include self-rated mental health recovery and “mastery of illness”. Second, feasibility analyses will examine consumers’ and workers’ perspectives on App usefulness, relevance and helpfulness. Third, data analytics from Driv-R will be examined for uptake, use and accessibility of the platform. Fourth, qualitative interviews will facilitate nuanced interpretation of findings. The outcome will be a freely available App that promotes consumers’ control over their mental health recovery journey.
Interventions
DRIVing my mental health Recovery (Driv-R) app. A smartphone app, based on the Recovery Assessment Scale - Domains and Stages (RAS-DS), and co-designed to provide education and support to mental health consumers and mental health workers to work more collaboratively and support mental health consumers to take a more active leadership role in their own mental health recovery.
The Driv-R app is currently being co-desgined by a team of 24 service users and mental health workers alongside the resea
DRIVing my mental health Recovery (Driv-R) app. A smartphone app, based on the Recovery Assessment Scale - Domains and Stages (RAS-DS), and co-designed to provide education and support to mental health consumers and mental health workers to work more collaboratively and support mental health consumers to take a more active leadership role in their own mental health recovery. The Driv-R app is currently being co-desgined by a team of 24 service users and mental health workers alongside the research team. The co-design team is made up of an equal mix of service users and service providers. The service user/consumer participants are individuals who are accessing a range of clinical and non-clinical mental health services and who have all experienced mental health challenges, service use and recovery. The mental health worker participants are a mix of clinical workers (e.g., occupational therapists, nurses, etc) and non-clinical workers such as peer workers (individuals with their own lived experiences of mental health challenges and recovery) and other mental health support workers from a range of backgrounds. The co-design workshops will include the following: (i) an initial 2-day "ideate" lab workshop that encourages all co-designers to consider design components (ii) following the initial design labs, the co-design team will be split into 2 groups - the deign team and the testing team (iii) the design team will be presented with wire-frames and prototypes of app designs and refine these and provide feedback over a series of two day-long workshops (iv) the design team, tester team, the research team and app developers will meet over a one day intensive design lab (v) the tester team will spend two more day-long workshops exploring and refining the app to ensure it addresses the needs of the anticipated user group. It is anticipated that the app will include features such as: (i) the opportunity to complete the RAS-DS - a 38-item self-report measure of mental health recovery (ii) presentation of self-rated recovery based on the each item and domain (iii) opportunity to explore each domain and suggestions as to goals / ideas that might be useful to promote recovery in that domain (potentially based on the RAS-DS workbook [https://ras-ds.net.au/workbooks]) Depending on what the co-design workshops prioritise, the content could include a variety of resources, but the main content will include features that allow tracking recovery scores over time (from the RAS-DS) and (potentially) tracking progress towards individually-determined goals and plans. The app may also include activities that promote discussion between workers and service users as well as potential self-directed activities from the RAS-DS workbooks or other activities. The app is designed to be used by mental health consumers along with their mental health workers, but guidance will be provided to individuals to connect with other mental health resources if needed. Prompts / notifications may be built into the app depending on outcomes of the co-design workshops, but at a minimum the app will prompt individuals to complete the RAS-DS at least once every 6 months. Adherence will be monitored via app analytics. The Driv-R will be used collaboratively by the consumer and mental health worker as frequently as desired over a 6-month intervention period. Following the intervention period, participants in the "comparison group" will also be enabled to access the app and use it collaboratively between the mental health worker and the consumer / service user. Participants in the intervention group will also be invited to participate in a post-trial qualitative interview. Qualitative interviews will be conducted with a sub-sample of participants (both consumers and workers) who interacted with Driv-R in the intervention phase. They will be selected through the purposive sampling strategy of maximum variation sampling, which ensures diversity of participants along relevant dimensions. In this case, interview participants will be selected to ensure variation based on data collected during the intervention phase, including mental health self-efficacy, frequency of Driv-R use, site, and satisfaction with Driv-R. As with much qualitative research, the appropriate number of participants will determined through the concept of ‘saturation’, where a rich understanding of relevant concepts has been achieved and additional interviews cease to yield additional categories and concepts. Based on our previous work, we estimate that this will be achieved by interviewing between 35 and 50 participants altogether. Separate, informed consent will be sought and interviews will be audio recorded and transcribed verbaitm. It is estimated that interviews will take between 15 and 45 minutes, depending on how much each individual wishes to share. Interviews will be conducted by a member of the interview team who has no existing relationship with the participant.
Sponsors
The University of Sydney
Study design
Allocation
Non-randomised trial
Intervention model
Parallel
Primary purpose
Educational / counselling / training
Masking
Open (masking not used)
Eligibility
Sex/Gender
All
Age
18 Years to No maximum
Healthy volunteers
No
Inclusion criteria
Current service users and mental health workers from participating mental health services and teams within those services.
Exclusion criteria
No exclusion criteria for mental health worker participants. Exclusion criteria for consumer participants: (1) Insufficient reading comprehension in English to complete RAS-DS and/or questionnaires; (2) Acute episode of illness requiring in-patient care.
Outcome results
None listed