Collaborate to Innovate: Accelerating the translation of research into innovations for impact in mental health

The need

Good mental health is crucial to personal, community and socio-economic development. The economic cost of mental ill-health is projected to be $16 trillion globally by 2030, with an estimated 12 billion working days lost due to mental illness every year. In 2019, mental health problems cost the UK economy at least £117.9 billion annually, or about 5% of GDP. 

Despite the progress made in research over the last 20 years, mental ill-health continues to increase. There is a clear imperative to accelerate the translation of research into innovations that are widely used to prevent, detect and reduce mental health conditions globally across society.

Mental Health Innovation and Impact Interest Group

The IfM is exploring developing a Mental Health Innovation and Impact Interest Group to help accelerate the translation of social, psychological and biological research into innovations that are applied at scale to improve mental health and wellbeing across society, in both developed and developing countries.

Participants

The meeting is open to University and University-related staff, including researchers, innovators, healthcare professionals, college and university staff with responsibility for mental health and wellbeing, and knowledge transfer and commercialisation specialists.

We hope that participants will come from a wide range of disciplines that could impact the development and implementation of mental health and wellbeing innovations and interventions. Examples include social, psychological and biological factors that contribute to the development of mental health conditions, digital health, wearable devices, food, public health, epidemiology, health economics, health policy, education, and change management for individuals, organisations and ecosystems.

Topics

The meeting will comprise:

An introductory session outlining the need to accelerate the translation of research into impactful innovations, example barriers and potential approaches.

Collaborative workshops to:

Identify and prioritise challenges and barriers to impactful innovation and implementation of interventions from prevention to treatment.

Explore how the challenges and barriers could be addressed.

Discussion of what the interest group could do to help accelerate the translation of research into impactful innovations, and next steps.

Potential scope of the Mental Health Innovation and Impact Interest Group

IfM has applied its innovation management and ecosystem mapping methods to address issues in mental health for nearly 10 years. We have found that the IfM’s structured methods can help overcome the extreme complexity of the mental health innovation and implementation ecosystem, bringing together key groups to accelerate innovation and potentially shorten time to impact.

From this work, it appears that an interest group could help to:

Understand:

How mental health conditions develop through a ‘joined-up’ understanding of social, psychological, and biological factors; from this systematic understanding, identify opportunities to improve prevention, early detection, diagnosis, and personalised management and treatment for key conditions.

Innovate:

Creating scientifically robust and user-acceptable solutions for prevention, early detection, diagnosis, and personalised management and treatment; and portfolios of innovations for stages of care, such as prevention, potentially configured for key groups, such as schools, employers, public health and other organisations.

Implement innovations:

Supporting behaviour change in individuals, change within organisations, and systemic change across ecosystems to help deliver effective improvements.