Evaluating the health, social and economic impact of equitable public mental health interventions (WP3)

The work package will evaluate potential Public Mental Health interventions from an equity perspective. It will also tie in with work occurring in the Public Mental Health (PMH) theme. This work package will extrapolate the long term health (physical and mental) and wider social and economic implications of equity definitions across the health service supply/access/outcome chain to public health for identified groups, particularly people in social crisis.

The aims are:

1. To develop a lifetime systems model to evaluate the economic and health (physical and mental) outcomes of targeting evidence based Public Mental Health interventions to specified groups, particularly those in social crisis.
2. Test methodologies identified from guidance from the EEPHS theme on how to evaluate equity improvements and how best to report the results to decision makers and stakeholders.

We will conduct economic evaluations of interventions highlighted as important in the PMH theme and conduct economic evaluations on these with a particular focus on equity. The implications of different equity definitions and methods will be explored as part of the evaluations. Based on the identified services, service gaps and identified groups we will use published literature, local authority data and other data sources to calculate the potential costs of service delivery and economic and health outcomes. In particular, we will identify potential hot spots of higher prevalence of the identified groups that may present ideal locations to implement the new interventions and reap the maximum benefits. In particular, we are likely to explore the implications of increasing access based on needs, particularly for people in social crisis including people in contact with criminal justice services and homeless populations.