Promoting a positive employment culture within SLaM

This project aims to understand the characteristics of effective employment service delivery to support individuals with severe mental illness (SMI) in gaining employment and to develop a Virtual Reality (VR) training course for staff. The core aim of the course is to promote positive inclusive attitudes and strengthen staff skills to improve the quality of employment support for service users.

You have been invited to take part because you are a SLaM or Lambeth IPS employee and have volunteered for the Employment Culture Change VR training programme and can share your views and experiences of the training. Your insights will help us understand how this programme may better prepare staff to support people with severe mental illness (SMI) in gaining employment and contribute to promoting a positive employment culture within mental health services.

If you choose to take part in the project, you will be invited to view a series of scenarios through the Virti VR app, using VR headsets. While the Virti App has various capabilities, including the ability to collect eye tracking data, these features will not be used in this project. No data of any kind will be collected from the Virti App itself. The only information we will gather will be the specific data listed below, which will be collected from you after you have viewed the scenarios.

Following each scenario, a VR champion will conduct a short debrief with you to collect your feedback and learn about your experience. You will also be asked to complete two surveys - one before the training and one after – to help us understand whether the programme has led to any changes in your skills, knowledge and attitudes. Additionally, we will invite you to complete the follow up surveys at 1 month and 3 months after training to explore any longer-term impacts of the training on you and your work practices. You will also have the option to take part in the follow up interview or focus group to explore in depth the longer-term impact of the VR training on you and your team.

The survey will be delivered online via Qualtrics and should take no longer than 15 minutes of your time to complete. If you choose to take part in the follow up interview or focus group, these will be held online through Microsoft Teams at a time that works best for you. Interviews will take up to 60 minutes and focus groups will take up to 90 minutes. You will have the choice at the start of the interview/focus group to be recorded by video or by voice only.

As part of participation, we will ask for some demographic information including your gender, ethnicity, and some details about your employment, including your professional group, department and settings. This information will be used for research purposes only.

Participation is completely voluntary. You should only take part if you want to. Choosing not to take part will not affect your employment and your rights and will not disadvantage you in any way. Once you have read the information sheet, please contact us if you have any questions that will help you decide about taking part. If you decide to take part, we will ask you to sign a consent form, and you will be given a copy of this consent form to keep.

By sharing your thoughts, you will help us identify ways to improve this training course and enhance mental healthcare services, particularly in supporting service users with employment opportunities. An additional benefit may be your participation in the training course, which can contribute to your continuous professional development (CPD).

The project is funded by the Maudsley Charity and is conducted by South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust.

The project has been reviewed and given a favourable opinion by Health Research Authority (HRA) Research Ethics Committee (Ethical Clearance Reference Number: 348442/ WM/0198). The review process ensures that the study complies with all relevant ethical and regulatory standards.

We will need to use the information from you for this research project. This information will include;

• your name
• your contact details

People will use this Information to do the research or to check your records to make sure that the research is being done properly. People who do not need to know who you are will not be able to see your name or contact details. Your data will have a code number instead.

South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (SLaM) is the sponsor of this research. SLaM is responsible for looking after your information. We will share your information related to this research project with King’s College London.

We will keep all information about you safe and secure by:

• Pseudonymising your data: The information collected from you, including your demographic data, will be pseudo-anonymised, which means that you will be assigned a unique code linked to your data. The code will be kept in a separate file accessible only by researchers.
• Protecting research data: The information collected by researchers (including the audio recording of the interview/focus group and notes) will be securely stored in a locked location. To analyse the interviews and focus groups in detail, we may need to transcribe them (type up the full text of the interview word by word). If you agree, we will send the recording to a professional transcription company, Way With Words (WWW), who will do this task while maintaining strict confidentiality. Additional precautions will be taken to ensure that the data shared with Way With Words is non-identifiable. Each participant will be assigned a unique code, and transcripts will only include this code, with no names or direct identifiers, to minimise the possibility of identifying study participants.
• Deleting recordings promptly: All recordings will be deleted as soon as they have been transcribed and checked.
• Protecting transcripts: Interview/focus group transcripts will be safely stored and password protected. Your name will not be on the transcripts – only your unique participant code will be used.
• Restricting data access: All project information will be kept on a secure SLaM server that only researchers can access.

Your data will not be shared outside the UK.

Once we have finished the study, we will keep some of the data so we can check the results. We will write our reports in a way that no-one can work out that you took part in the study.

We will keep your study data for a maximum of 5 years. The study data will then be destroyed.

• You can stop being part of the study at any time, without giving a reason, but we will keep information about you that we already have.
• You have the right to ask us to access, remove, change or delete data we hold about you for the purposes of the study. You can also object to our processing of your data. We might not always be able to do this if it means we cannot use your data to do the research. If so, we will tell you why we cannot do this
• If you agree to take part in this study, you will have the option to take part in future research using your data saved from this study

You can find out more about how we use your information:

• by sending an email to the research team: MLResearch@slam.nhs.uk
• by sending an email to our Data Protection Officer at SLaM: informationgovernance@slam.nhs.uk
• at: www.hra.nhs.uk/patientdataandresearch

Data collected from you will help us understand if the newly designed VR training programme improves SLaM staff's knowledge, skills and attitudes in supporting service users with employment and how this training can be improved further. We will prepare a report to share with relevant people within the Trust, but you will not be named or identified in any of the outputs.

We will also write a research paper about the results and can share it with you by email if you ask. Research papers can take years to publish so keep this in mind. We may use direct quotes from interviews, but they won’t show your name. We may also make a shorter version of the report that we can share with you. After the research is done, we might share the results at events, on the Maudsley Learning website, and with the Maudsley Charity, who helped pay for the project. The project will last for about 18 months.

If you have a concern about any aspect of this study, you should ask to speak to the researchers who will do their best to answer your questions: Dr Sean Cross, 03308089391, sean.cross@slam.nhs.uk.

If you remain unhappy and wish to complain formally, you can contact Tanya Shlovogt (Director of Research Quality, Joint R&D Office of SLaM and IoPPN, tanya.shlovogt@kcl.ac.uk).

In the event that something does go wrong, and you are harmed during the research, and this is due to someone’s negligence, then you may have grounds for legal action for compensation against SLaM, but you may have to pay your legal costs. The normal National Health Service complaints mechanisms will still be available to you (if appropriate), and you can complain:

• By post to: NHS England, PO Box 16738, Redditch, B97 9PT
• By email to: england.contactus@nhs.net,
• By phone: 0300 311 22 33