Community-based mental health intervention report: Proposal and implementation

Context (300 Words)

The assignment for this module is a 2000-word report that proposes a community based mental health intervention or campaign. Your report will draw on recent research evidence and practice guidance to provide a clear rationale for your proposal.

Structure of Your Report:
1) Context (300 Words): Give an overview of the community that your intervention and the specific mental health issue that you are targeting.

2) Review (700 words): Critically discuss previous community level interventions that have addressed this problem or communities that share characteristics with the community that you wish to support.

3) Implementation (700 words) : Discuss in detail how your intervention/campaign would be implemented.

4) Impact (300 words): Discuss what measures or outcomes would indicate whether your programme had worked Your report should be set out under these headings and you should stay within the word limits for each section (plus or minus 10%). There is further detailed guidance on what should go into each section below.

Give an overview of the community that your intervention and the specific mental choose a well-defined community: A group of people who are linked by social ties,and/or share common experiences, perspectives or characteristics.
• Outline the community you have chosen to focus but avoid stereotypes and blanket assumptions. Any statement that you make about a community should be well founded in available data & evidence.
• Provide a rationale for your choice.
• Choose a specific mental health issues that you want to target (e.g. depression, psychosis, pts, etc.)
• This section will be mainly written in the present tense.

Critically discuss previous community level interventions that have addressed this problem or communities that share characteristics with the community that you wish to support.

• The aim of this part of your report is provide a basis for planning the intervention that you propose in the next section.
• This is the most essay like part of your report.
• Write a critical review of relevant published community or social mental health interventions.
• It is important to evaluate the studies and interventions that you discuss.
• This section will be mainly written in the past tense as it will describe research and initiatives that have already happened.

Discuss in detail how your intervention/campaign would be implemented.

• The aim of this part of the report is to produce a detailed overview of how your intervention or campaign would be implemented.
• In designing your own intervention or campaign you should draw upon, and modify,existing interventions that have been used. You should propose something new but firmly grounded in existing approaches (an action research approach).
• It is important to provide a rationale for the actions that you are implementing.
• It is important to explicitly consider in this section how you will foster engagement and grassroots activity from community members.
• Have a look at Castillo, E. G., et al. (2019). Community interventions to promote mental health and social equity. Current Psychiatry Reports, 21, 35 for a good range of examples.
• This section will mainly be written in the future tense as it will discuss what you will do.

Review (700 words)

Discuss what measures or outcomes would indicate whether your programme had worked (or not).

• What would change if your intervention had worked? What would change in the short-term and what would persist over the longer-term (legacy).
• What would you measure to check this?
• It is important to consider engagement with your programme from community members as an indicator of success.
• Have a look at Chapter 6 in Jason et al. (2019). Introduction to Community Psychology.
• This section will mainly be written in the future tense as you will discuss what you will

Further Tips and Guidance.

a) Getting started on your assignment.
Before you decide the on the topic and intervention for your assignment it is important to have a clear idea of the range of interventions for mental health that have been used at a community level. This means that you should do plenty of reading before you begin to start planning your report. Reading widely before planning coursework has been shown to improve final grades
(Torrance et al., 2000), so even if you are itching to get started it is best to spend some time,first, immersing yourself in the topic.

You can read chapters 1 and 11 in Jason et al. (2019). Introduction to Community Psychology to get started on understanding the field. This paper Castillo, E. G., et al. (2019). Community interventions to promote mental health and social equity. Current Psychiatry Reports, 21, 35 provides a good range of examples on community mental health interventions. Most lecture
sessions have included examples of social and community interventions. For further ideas you can look at the videos that have been posted to MyLearning.

b) Finding and selecting sources.
As with all university assessments (particularly in your final year) it is important to show that you are familiar with the cutting edge of the topic that you are writing about. This means that you will need to undertake a proper literature search once you have narrowed down to a topic. If you need a refresher on literature searching you can find a guide here.

However, when it comes to this module there are some additional sources of ‘grey literature’ that you mind find helpful. These sources include reports produced by the World Health Organisation, British Psychological Society, the Mental Health Foundation and Local NHS trusts. We have linked several such sources to the MyLearning page for the module. You should ensure that the resources that you rely upon are written by experts for a specialist audience. Avoid using resources that are targeted at the general public (e.g. NHS 111) as these are may oversimplify complex subjects and do not convey a sense that you have
mastered the depth of a topic.

c) Identifying a community for your intervention
There are many definitions of ‘community’ and we will not be requiring you to use one particular definition of the term. A broad definition of community: A group of people who are linked by social ties, and/or share common experiences, perspectives or characteristics.