Derek Tracy is the Medical Director of West London NHS Trust. He was previously the Clinical Director of a nationally innovative integrated directorate of adult social care, mental and physical health services in South East London. His clinical work has generally been in crisis care: his team produced some of the first qualitative and patient-centred research on Home Treatment Teams and designed and ran an award-winning digitised patient reported outcome measurement (PROM) programme that has been profiled by NHS England.
Derek is a Senior Lecturer at King’s and University College London. He has published over one hundred peer-reviewed scientific papers and fifteen book chapters. His research interests include New Psychoactive Substances (‘legal highs’) and Derek is a member of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs that advises the Home Office on drug harms.
At the Royal College of Psychiatrists Derek is an elected member of the executives of the academic, evolutionary psychiatry, and occupational health faculties. With regards to the last of these, he has a particular interest in NHS staff well-being; in 2020 he was co-opted as one of the medical leads to design and run the mental health team at the London Nightingale hospital, providing on-site support to ITU staff during the pandemic. He is the editor for public engagement at the British Journal of Psychiatry, writing its Kaleidoscope and Highlights columns, and running its social media output and trainee-engagement programme.
Derek is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, the Royal Society of Arts, and the Royal College of Psychiatrists; he was a Founding Fellow of the Faculty of Medical Leadership and Management. In 2015 he was awarded the Institute of Psychiatry’s Teaching Excellence Award, and in 2019 the Royal College of Psychiatrist’s “Communicator of the Year” award. He likes enthusiastic people, running, and the Stone Roses; he hates whinging, butter, and cats.
Jenny Collom, Maria Giorgalli and Derek Tracy welcome a new RCT published yesterday in The Lancet which demonstrates the benefits of peer-supported self-management for people discharged from a mental health crisis team.
Students and Teachers from the King’s College London PNoMH Distance Learning MSc summarise a major new meta-analysis that brings together the last 60 years of placebo-controlled antipsychotic drug trials in acute schizophrenia.
Martina Sawicka and Derek Tracy take a look at the ReQOL scale (Recovering Quality of Life): a patient reported outcome measure (PROM) for use with people experiencing mental health difficulties.
Derek Tracy takes a first look at the Novel Psychoactive Substances in the UK Project; an NIHR-funded empirical and conceptual review that recommends research priorities in the field.
Judith Harrison publishes her debut blog on a recent cohort study in the British Journal of Psychiatry, which shows that the “mortality gap” is increasing for people with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.
Derek Tracy and Lisa Lloyd look back over the last 17 years of mental health crisis care and consider the findings of a new survey of Crisis Resolution Teams in England.
Derek Tracy writes his debut Mental Elf blog on a recent study that explored the clinical factors that impacted on outcomes in crisis resolution services across two large mental health Trusts in London.
