Population-based approaches to improving mental health: a view from the USA

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David Gunnell writes his debut elf blog on a recent review of population-based approaches to mental health. He calls for joined-up strategies across Government Departments to prevent mental illness and improve population mental health.

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Mental health policy: are the “facts” based on “evidence”?

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Anjuli Kaul’s debut blog explores the latest evidence on the accuracy and accessibility of cited evidence in mental health policy documents.

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Social Care in Northern Ireland – not as different as you might think

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Catherine Needham reviews a study by Chapman (2019) which considers older people’s knowledge and understanding of the social care system in Northern Ireland.

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School dental screening

The review found that adding family-based interventions to school-based interventions may reduce the onset of smoking by 4-25%.

This Cochrane review of school dental screening included 6 RCTs finding insufficient evidence that it improves dental attendance. although personalised referral letters or additional motivation elements probably have the ability to improve dental attendance over the short term.

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Bullying in childhood and adolescence: we need to do better

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Tamsin Ford publishes her debut elf blog on an annual research review by Louise Arseneault in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, which looks at the persistent and pervasive impact of being bullied in childhood and adolescence, and considers important implications for policy and practice.

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Research unit to bring evidence to forefront of mental health policy

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Today we announce the launch of the new NIHR Mental Health Policy Research Unit, led by Sonia Johnson from UCL & Paul McCrone from King’s, alongside researchers from City, University of London and Middlesex University.

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How “Big Society” is experienced in the lives of people with learning disabilities: Austerity, broken promises and cruel optimism

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Big Society? Disabled people with learning disabilities and civil society is a project funded by the Economic and Social research council (June, 2013 – September, 2015).

The project is a collaboration between universities and organisations of and for people with learning disabilities, further details can be found at: www.bigsocietydis.wordpress.com

Here, just as the project shares its findings at a national conference, Katherine Runswick Cole sets the scene and Silvana Mengoni posts about one of the published papers from the project.

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E-markets and micros: evidence for the future of social care?

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Sarah Carr takes an unusual step of appraising a ‘think tank’ research report on e-marketplaces for social care and discusses the work in relation to the broader context of evidence-based policy.

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Trying targets: did Local Area Agreements support social cohesion?

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Jenny Fisher asks if the Local Area Agreement policy intervention and associated targets helped with social cohesion and offers useful pointers for further reading on the topic.

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